This way, the previously “wasted” human computation time could be put to good, productive use. to Pittsburgh when he came up with the idea of using real, unreadable words rather than fake distorted characters. The story goes that von Ahn was driving from D.C.

Specifically, 200 million words / day at about 10 seconds each adds up to about 500,000 hours of wasted human computation every day. In an interview with The Walrus, Luis said that he’d unwittingly created a system that “was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles.” This stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Looking past the questionably complicated acronym, the CAPTCHA system displayed distorted sequences of letters for people to transcribe, thereby proving they were human.Īlthough CAPTCHA was effective in preventing scammer bots, von Ahn recognized a new problem relating to efficiency. The solution that he came up with was CAPTCHA.

One practical application being a way to prevent automated programs from buying event tickets only to be resold in a secondary market at a higher price. He worked alongside his professor, Manuel Blum, on developing a test that humans can pass but not computers. In 2000, 22-year-old Luis von Ahn was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon.

Recaptcha work from home