[willscott]

I went to a speech by savage earlier this fall. The point that I took away from it is that what captchas do is filter out the bad guys who haven't figured out a business model.

On the klingon point: They theorized that the particular organization was a bunch of PHDs rather than farmed labor - and that it had learned from previous 'example answers' they had submitted. That particular organization, it was noted, was also an order of magnitude more expensive than the others.

[gwern]

But... why is an organization of PhDs solving CAPTCHAs? Even if they are the most expensive service, it still seems to offer terrible hourly returns. That only raises the mystery.

[aristus]

An organization of PhDs writing software that solves captchas.

[roel_v]

"it still seems to offer terrible hourly returns."

Not if they train software to recognize letters. Once they succeed in that, they essentially have a money printing machine for a while.

[Tycho]

I don't understand what difference it makes being in Klingon? usually Captchas are just jibberish anyway. Recognizing individual letters remains the challenge.

[rmc]

They used the Klingon alphabet, which is nothing like the latin alphabet

[willscott]

They were asking for english translations of words in various languages - hoping to determine the demographics of the workers solving the captchas.

[Tycho]

are you sure? I thought they were simply postulating that native speakers would more accurately 'capture' the characters of a word/phrase if they recognized it from their own language. If you know what a word is supposed to be, then it's easier to read messy writing. I realize I could find out by just reading the PDF paper, but I think it's worth answering here for the benefit of HN readers

[trotsky]

Interesting. I just read the PDF to see - they were sending captchas where the goal was to translate a series of written numbers in the native language into roman numerals. So (une)-(deux)-(trois) --> 1 2 3 along with instructions for solving the captcha in the related language.

As best I can tell, the klingon used wasn't even in a latin font. So the correct answers were essentially translating arbitrary symbols into their associated numbers. Certainly throws off what I was assuming from the blog read.

They do note that the service, ImageToText, was the most expensive by far.