5 things crowds do better than science people

[Slargos]

http://www.cracked.com/article_19431_5-mind-blowing-things-crowds-do-better-than-experts.html

Amaztacular. 

[Habbaku]

We used to have crowds that were really good at doing things here in the South, but the Yankees made us stop.

[MadBurgerMaker]

I didn't know that about CAPTCHA.  That's pretty cool.

[Siege]

Ridiculous.

[garbon]

I didn't know that about CAPTCHA.  That's pretty cool.

Me neither. Now I'm not as annoyed.

[jimmy olsen]

These coincidences are just amazing!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18788_the-5-most-mind-blowing-coincidences-all-time.html?wa_user1=5&wa_user2=History&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=recommended

[Warspite]

How does the Captcha thing work then? Because surely in order to detect whether I have entered the word properly, it needs to know what it is - which defeats the purpose of using it to determine an illegible word.

[Maximus]

Probably by giving the word out to a number of random people on the principle that the majority of them will answer correctly. It could have some confidence threshold and keep throwing the same word out until it reaches it.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Sometimes they'll give you two capchas -- a scanned word from a text and then some known word or gibberish. It assumes that if you got the known one right then you also got the scanned word right.

[Josquius]

I covered crowd sourcing a bit in my degree, it is pretty powerful stuff.
Never heard of this somali pirate thing, interesting. Most crowd sourcing I've heard of was done by less cool means, just the power of large online communities to figure out problems.

[Ideologue]

These coincidences are just amazing!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18788_the-5-most-mind-blowing-coincidences-all-time.html?wa_user1=5&wa_user2=History&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=recommended

I like the article about Islam that says that Muslims have historically been very mild conquerors and soldiers and doesn't mention the name "Timur" once.

[Tamas]

Probably by giving the word out to a number of random people on the principle that the majority of them will answer correctly. It could have some confidence threshold and keep throwing the same word out until it reaches it.

Thats fine, except that it is used to determine your human-ness on the spot. It is not a questionaire, it is a security measure. If it does not have a method of instant verification, it loses it's purpose.

[Maximus]

Thats fine, except that it is used to determine your human-ness on the spot. It is not a questionaire, it is a security measure. If it does not have a method of instant verification, it loses it's purpose.

Combine with Colossus's point. It gives you a known and an unknown. If you answer the known correctly then you're deemed human and pass the test. You also give the system an idea of what the unknown might be. Eventually it can have enough confidence to give you the unknown by itself. So long as you are within some threshold of similarity you pass and continue to improve its knowledge. It's a form of semi-supervised learning.

[Slargos]

These coincidences are just amazing!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18788_the-5-most-mind-blowing-coincidences-all-time.html?wa_user1=5&wa_user2=History&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=recommended

I like the article about Islam that says that Muslims have historically been very mild conquerors and soldiers and doesn't mention the name "Timur" once.

They are notorious islamophiles over there. It's relatively sickening, but I like the site enough that I can overlook the odd islamospooge.