Why Massive-Online Collaboration is the best Collaboration

CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is the service for website owners that allows them to stifle malicious activity. Essentially, it is the oddly shaped or dis-formed lettering that needs to be entered before a form, like a submission or sign-up form, can be completed. This is used to prove the “authenticity” of a human user. CAPTCHA uses text not intelligible to computer programs. In this way, the common case of ticket-scalpers can’t purchase hundreds upon thousands of tickets at once, since they’d have to enter the CAPTCHA manually for every order. Shortly after it’s widespread use, the creators of CAPTCHA discovered a new application of their software. About 200 million people use CAPTCHA daily, and waste 10 seconds doing so. Instead of those 10 seconds being wasted, they came up with reCAPTCHA. Namely, reCAPTCHA was the same application of CAPTCHA, except it included a second word. Since CAPTCHA used words computers couldn’t read, they added a word that couldn’t be read by the computers that digitize books. In this way, they assembled a task force in the upwards of 200,000,000 people to digitize books for “free”. This might at first seem counter-intuitive, because how would the reCAPTCHA know if the person was correct with the second word or not? Well the trick is, it doesn’t. If the person solves the first word, it assumes that they could have solved the latter word just as well. One might think that then this causes words to be digitized improperly if the second word is wrong, but contrary to that thought, it doesn’t. They don’t take one user’s word for it, they send the same word out to multiple users, and when say 100 users respond the same to a word, it then becomes safe to assume the word has been correctly digitized.

Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

Google has seemed to have acquired the reCAPTCHA program and has placed it right under their wide-spread wing. Now that Google is an endorser of reCAPTCHA, Google’s reach can allow the reCAPTCHA services to be planted in even the smallest of domains, say a private-owned pizzeria’s website. With an even larger reach, reCAPTCHA’s efficiency goes through the roof.

What reCAPTCHA did is take the average 10 seconds “wasted” by users daily, and put some good-doing behind it by digitizing books. However, now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA the applications seem to be endless.

Google implements the words entered with reCAPTCHA for several applications. One happens to be for Google Maps. Anyone who uses Google Maps might know that it is a relatively young, and ever-growing, service. To help make their maps more accurate and relevant, Google sometimes throws in words that are on street-signs and business-signs into reCAPTCHA. The applications don’t end there! Google also uses the same image-annotation words to build a database to improve collective progress towards AI(Artificial Intelligence).

Gamers Solving Age-Old Problems

Gamers are hardly recognized for their virtual valor because their achievements and progress can’t possibly help in the real world. Or can they? Recently, games have been developed that use the addictive characteristic to attract and keep gamers playing. But these aren’t just normal addictive games, these games have, sometimes implicit, meaning to them. They use the strategies applied by said gamers in real life in scenarios such as wildlife preservation. Other times it’s more explicitly applicable, like mapping neurons or enzymes in a puzzle game.

Working Hypothesis 1

Utilizing Massive-Online Collaboration on a more global scale would result in the more efficient and profitable completion of common human goals.

Working Hypothesis 2

Topics for Smaller Papers

• CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA: The story of free book digitization.
• Gamers Solving Age-Old Problems
• Los Alamos National Laboratory uses Massive Collaboration to Defuse Bombs

Current State:

I feel off-track so far with my progress, but I’m hoping the increased time spent on the topic will grant me with more organization of my information. I am having a hard time creating a second hypothesis, however. I feel I am on a one-track mind with the topic of massive-online collaboration. I don’t see how I can spin this in another direction.