Don’t Worry—No reCATPCHA Puzzle Required to Read This Post
Pictured: Luis Von Ahn
If you use the internet, I'm sure you're very familiar with "reCAPTCHA"- those puzzles that you have to successfully complete in order to login to your accounts. Why am I bringing this up? It's because this week is about Luis Von Ahn- the inventor of the reCAPTCHA system.
What Would You Say If... I told you that those puzzles and words that you have to decipher before logging onto your account actually play a pretty crucial role in our everyday lives and our online security, let me explain.
Manuel Blum (Luis' professor) with the help of Von Ahn was able to develop a system, called CAPTCHA. The purpose of it was to help keep spam bots out of chatrooms and separate humans from robots but Von Ahn saw that this technology had more potential and created his own version called reCAPTCHA.
The major difference in Von Ahn's system is that reCAPTCHA didn't just verify that someone was a human but it added another layer and provided a puzzle or word of some sort that could not be solved by the computer.
Better explained by Allison Griswold in an article published on Insider: "The first word in a reCAPTCHA is an automated test generated by the system, but the second usually comes from an old book or newspaper article that a computer scanner is trying (and failing) to digitize. If the person answering the reCAPTCHA gets the first word correct (which the computer knows the answer to), then the system assumes the second word has been translated accurately as well."
Even though Luis has since sold reCAPTCHA to Google, it has continued to be used as a way to provide security measures online and it's safe to say (literally) that Luis Von Ahn definitely ran with tech so we could run even further!
TL;DR:
Luis Von Ahn- inventor of reCAPTCHA provided a way for additional security measures to be taken online. His tech invention made it so that spam bots and robots would have a difficult time solving word puzzles which ultimately helped to differentiate humans logging into a system or robots attempting to, it has since been sold to Google but they've continued to improve upon this technology to create a more secure environment online.