reCAPTCHA
For those you who make frequent comments on my blog posts would have noticed that reCAPTCHA is employed to stop spam. Recently, I’ve come across a paper by them, published in Science, that speaks of the results they have achieved – human computation.
They did a comparison page between the results generated by humans from reCAPTCHA and OCRs and the results are rather amazing. Your solving of simple CAPTCHA indeed helps digitise books by tapping into redundant human resource.
In addition, they also did an article for Science which details the results of the reCAPTCHA project. Do take a quick peek, it’s an interesting read.