Resumen
Researchers are turning to computers to help people take advantage of their own cognitive abilities and of the wisdom of crowds. Through a distributed problem-solving process variously known as crowdsourcing, human computation, and computer-aided micro-consulting, answers are solicited online to a set of simple, specific questions that computers can't solve. One of the oldest commercial crowdsourcing applications is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Named after a famous 18th century chess-playing "machine" that was secretly operated by a human, it offers a flexible, Web-based platform for creating and publicizing tasks and distributing micro-payments. Researchers like Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Luis von Ahn are finding ways to put crowdsourcing to work. ReCAPTCHA is an attempt to take advantage of a task that millions of people perform in the course of their everyday online lives: solve the ubiquitous character recognition tests known as CAPTCHAs to prove they are human.