H.I.
The original Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing machine that was built in 1770. It toured Europe defeating humans such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin until its destruction by fire in 1854.
The same year Beethoven is born, the same year Australia is discovered, 6 years before the United States is created, 70 years before Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage make the notes for their Analytical Engine — which is generally considered to be the first algorithm — Wolfgang von Kempelen creates a machine that can best most humans at chess.
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In the late 1990s, the internet has a problem.
Every site and email address is being spammed by computers. More specifically, a very few humans are using computers which use computers to spam many other humans’ computers. Early web scrapers were being thwarted by “login” forms, and thus the web driver was born — a program that could automate the filling in of form fields and allow programs to make countless accounts on virtually every website.
Thankfully though, a hero arrives. Luis von Ahn was born in 1978 in Guatemala City, Guatemala. In the year 2000, at only 22 years old, he creates the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, better known as the CAPTCHA. You’ve seen CAPTCHAs before, and (even though you don’t need to) you’ll see them again. CAPTCHAs are that part of the creation of accounts that make you identify which pictures have cars, or stoplights, or people in them. In their early days, CAPTCHAs used to have you type out hard to decipher words.
We used to have to do a CAPTCHA for practically everything we did on the internet. Thankfully someone came up with a more efficient (and less ableist) method using behavioral analysis where they only give you the hard test if your behavior is close to that of a bot, otherwise, they just ask if you’re a robot. Yet, somewhat often you are still asked to identify images, but the system now is not just a CAPTCHA, it’s actually a reCAPTCHA.
In 2007 our champion, Luis von Ahn, created reCAPTCHA. Most wouldn’t have noticed the difference between CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA (I didn’t) but its implications were vast.
After creating CAPTCHA, and seeing its use proliferate throughout the world, Luis realized he “had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles”.
The difference between CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA is that the work done for reCAPTCHA is not wasted effort.
Google has been digitizing old books since 2007. Some words are hard for computers to read though, since computers are generally stupid (I mean, come on, they can’t even really do division). Google bought Luis van Ahn’s reCAPTCHA to help solve this.
With reCAPTCHA, each 10 seconds of work a person did when deciphering a word wasn’t just going to waste, it was helping to transcribe some part of a corpus in order for it to be digitally preserved.
Now that task is mostly done, and now they have a tool where they can discern you from a bot anyways. Yet, you’re still sometimes shown images with or without roads, stoplights, signs, cars, or people in them. What do you think Google might be doing with your work now?
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The secret to the Mechanical Turk was so simple that no one thought of it. Have you?
There was a chess master inside of the machine who was controlling it. That’s how it worked. It capitalized on a “most precious resource: human brain cycles.”
These days, if you want to build a bot that can get around reCAPTCHAs there are services that can do this. Some claim to have figured out how to mask a computer’s behaviors and/or be able to figure out the picture problems.
While others have set up a pipeline to find a human who will solve the problem for the computer. They likely use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to find a human who is at a machine ready to make a move.
Sources:
- reCAPTCHA on Wikipedia
- CAPTCHA on Wikipedia
- Luis von Ahn Wikipedia
- Ada Lovelace on Wikipedia
- Mechanical Turk on Wikipedia
- Using Google's date range feature to search for info on web drivers written in the '90s.
