What if we joined the tool to ... the tool?

Luis Van Ham is a professor at the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and he works on human computation, meaning programmes that combine the power of human thinking with the calculation speed of computers to solve problems that humans or computers alone cannot solve (OCR tools are a typical example). He developed the concept of objective games, whereby humans while playing, are actually carrying out useful operations. Even if it is not a game, the reCaptcha he developed follows this principle. Every time we decipher deformed words, taken from the digitalisation of old books, to prove to the internet site that you are a human being, you are actually contributing to the growth of the database used by OCR software and to improve their effectiveness in recognising digital characters in old books.