Quote: But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known.

hmm, I would have just taken a more probabilistic approach, and just given every word to 10 people, and go with the average.

I really like the idea of harnessing ‘wasted’ human cycles to do stuff. There’s a bunch of this type of work going on at CMU lately.
http://www.peekaboom.org/
http://www.espgame.org/

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