The Fascinating Story Behind Captcha

I had no idea that the history of this little doohickey was so interesting.

While there are exceptions, most TED talks are downright inspiring and they are sure as hell informative. Check out the one below on using captcha to digitize books and translate Wikipedia into different languages, overcoming significant and seemingly insurmountable problems in the process.

In a word, wow.

As an aside, I never knew that captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” If it took 100,000 people to put a man on the moon, what can 750,000,000 people do?