If you have ever wondered what CAPTCHA was it is Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart designed by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Luis Von Ahn. This is a security program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. 

Von Ahn first developed the CAPTCHA program for Yahoo, and it is now used by numerous sites across the internet. Due to the mass implementation of his program, Von Ahn desired a way to make the massive amount of time spent using his program to better society. About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort?

He has since created reCAPTCHA that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows, while still providing a free anti-spam service. It combines an unknown word from a text being digitized with a CAPTCHA. Currently reCAPTCHA is helping to digitize texts for the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times. 

Watch this video from PBS Nova Science now with Neil deGrasse Tyson (You must click the fullscreen box to see it). Also visit recaptcha.net and Professor Von Ahn's Blog vonahn.blogspot.net. He also heads gwap.com (Games With A Purpose) a crowd-sourced solution to the problem of labeling images and sounds on the Internet.

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