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Interestingly I activated a new gmail account today and during the signup process I experienced the obligatory captcha. It was in two parts, the first looked st

by josho 13y ago

Interestingly I activated a new gmail account today and during the signup process I experienced the obligatory captcha. It was in two parts, the first looked strikingly like a street view picture of a house number, while the second looked like a traditional captcha. I suspect that google has been using techniques like this to validate their computer vision conclusions. Which makes their 99% assertion even more interesting, because it's likely 99% confirmed by a very large crowd sourced data set, not simply a staff member going through several hundred samples to come up with the success rate.

wmf 13y ago
That's been going on for two years: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-...
- 001sky 13y ago
  Isn't this like free mechanichal turk services? Or forced labour or something. Cynically brilliant outsourcing, tho.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Humans recognize images, machine learning makes use of that in ways no human fully understands, and that makes it "google's computer vision"? AI has really come a long way :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
  - vowelless 13y ago
    I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Luis von Ahn, creater of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. He calls this "human computation". He is also the founder of Duolingo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8
    - nathancahill 13y ago
      He's also one of the few famous entrepreneurs from Guatemala.
      - thrownaway2424 13y ago
        That's fantastic. I was trying to guess from the name. Latin American? German? Vietnamese?
        junto 13y ago
        Most likely of German descent. I seem to remember when travelling through Guatemala about 10 years ago that one of the locals that I got to know explained that the wealth in Guatemala, especially around Antigua, is concentrated in a number of immigrant families of European (primarily German) descent. There are about 13 large families and they tend to marry within that group.
id 13y ago
It has been like this for a while now. AFAIK you have either - the actual captcha and a word from a book (Google Books) - the actual captcha and a house number from Street View (Google Maps) Only the actual captcha has to be typed in correctly.
- ashmud 13y ago
  Do people ever intentionally type in nonsense for the non-captcha part, out of spite, for instance? If you could persuade enough people to provide non-answers for the non-captcha part, would Google stop using it (the non-captcha part)? My guess is it's like spam. As long as it works a small fraction of the time, it will still exist.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Larrikin 13y ago
    I don't think I've typed a whole captcha in over a year. It is always obvious which part it's necessary, and now that most of the time the unnecessary part is to improve Google's bottom line by checking addresses instead of helping digitize books I will continue typing dhgd instead. typing an intentionally wrong word is just as much a waste of time as typing the right word
  - akgerber 13y ago
    I did when Recaptcha came out and it was consistently obvious which was the unknown part. It's no longer so obvious, in my experience. I believe ReCaptcha presents the same unknown value to several users, and rejects outliers.
    - id 13y ago
      In my experience, it's still extremely obvious. It's always the word that's less readable (and doesn't look like it came from a book). And if you have numbers, it's even easier. Recently they added special captchas for untrusted users. If they think you might be a bot, you'll get much harder captchas. http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-easier-but-only-if.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j...
yaroslavvb 13y ago
The 99.8% assertion comes from synthetically generated CAPTCHAs. We don't need crowd-sourced ground-truth -- we know what the true answer is because we generated it.

by josho 13y ago

wmf 13y ago

That's been going on for two years: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-...

001sky 13y ago
Isn't this like free mechanichal turk services? Or forced labour or something. Cynically brilliant outsourcing, tho.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Humans recognize images, machine learning makes use of that in ways no human fully understands, and that makes it "google's computer vision"? AI has really come a long way :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
- vowelless 13y ago
  I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Luis von Ahn, creater of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. He calls this "human computation". He is also the founder of Duolingo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ht4qiDRZE8
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    He's also one of the few famous entrepreneurs from Guatemala.
    - thrownaway2424 13y ago
      That's fantastic. I was trying to guess from the name. Latin American? German? Vietnamese?
      - junto 13y ago
        Most likely of German descent. I seem to remember when travelling through Guatemala about 10 years ago that one of the locals that I got to know explained that the wealth in Guatemala, especially around Antigua, is concentrated in a number of immigrant families of European (primarily German) descent. There are about 13 large families and they tend to marry within that group.

id 13y ago

It has been like this for a while now. AFAIK you have either - the actual captcha and a word from a book (Google Books) - the actual captcha and a house number from Street View (Google Maps) Only the actual captcha has to be typed in correctly.

ashmud 13y ago
Do people ever intentionally type in nonsense for the non-captcha part, out of spite, for instance? If you could persuade enough people to provide non-answers for the non-captcha part, would Google stop using it (the non-captcha part)? My guess is it's like spam. As long as it works a small fraction of the time, it will still exist.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Larrikin 13y ago
  I don't think I've typed a whole captcha in over a year. It is always obvious which part it's necessary, and now that most of the time the unnecessary part is to improve Google's bottom line by checking addresses instead of helping digitize books I will continue typing dhgd instead. typing an intentionally wrong word is just as much a waste of time as typing the right word
- akgerber 13y ago
  I did when Recaptcha came out and it was consistently obvious which was the unknown part. It's no longer so obvious, in my experience. I believe ReCaptcha presents the same unknown value to several users, and rejects outliers.
  - id 13y ago
    In my experience, it's still extremely obvious. It's always the word that's less readable (and doesn't look like it came from a book). And if you have numbers, it's even easier. Recently they added special captchas for untrusted users. If they think you might be a bot, you'll get much harder captchas. http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-just-got-easier-but-only-if.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j...

yaroslavvb 13y ago

The 99.8% assertion comes from synthetically generated CAPTCHAs. We don't need crowd-sourced ground-truth -- we know what the true answer is because we generated it.