Captcha

Computer visual recognition has become very popular. This is due to the large number of bots running around on the internet, setting up bogus accounts, spamming chatrooms, and email accounts. To combat these bots, Yahoo was determined to administer a test that humans could pass, but computers could not. Therefore, Luis von Ahn, a 28 year old professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, wrote a program that generates four random lerters and numbers, distorts them, and places them on a fuzzy background. The user then types in the four characters correctly and is granted access. He coined this test the "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart" thus...CAPTCHA. Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft have adopted Captachas into their systems. I have come across these captchas sometimes when i attempt to send a message or friend request on facebook and myspace. I guess the system wants to make sure I'm not a bot.

Von Ahn took this idea a step further and created a game where two players must agree on which of two pictures is prettier. The database is comprised of 100,000 photos. Through this game "Matchin" humans are tricked into teaching the computer what constitutes prettiness. This same type of logic hs been used for the Google Image Labeler. In turn Google's database of images has become better and smarter.