Just for fun: Digitizing books with reCAPTCHA

Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon not only invented captcha (those exasperating squiggly words that tell websites you are a human), he reinvented it.  ReCaptcha is now a tool for digitizing books.  Ever since I learned that, I've found them much less annoying.  Well, okay, a bit less annoying.


Here's an excerpt from NOVA ScienceNow explaining reCaptcha.





You can watch von Ahn's TED talk here.