[jdimov]

What (if anything) is this saying about the quality of the OCR process? Especially since none of these seem human readable.

[praptak]

Not much, probably. It would be largely wasted effort to tune OCR algorithms to avoid (falsely) recognizing letters in artificially synthetized datasets that don't occur in practice.

[d23]

Why's it so highly upvoted then? I was expecting something moderately legible.

[mglinski]

> I was expecting something moderately legible.

Is human handwriting anything more then repeated patterns with lines and shapes on a 2d plane?

A computer program designed by humans to assist with human constructs can infer meaning from what appears to be mostly noise to humans. It hits us hard because communication through complex language is the defining trait of our species. It manages to do what we do, and many people are intrigued by the results.

Are we just observing the results of our actions or did we just take one more small step towards the singularity?

[pavel_lishin]

I'm not bothered by it any more than I'm bothered by our brains' propensity for seeing faces where there aren't any.

[driverdan]

That's a pretty interesting way of looking at it, machine pareidolia.

[jfoster]

Even computers see faces where there aren't any. I've had Facebook's tagging functionality sometimes pick a non-human part of an image as a face to be tagged.

[breadbox]

Only a reminder that the OCR process looks nothing like what humans do.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Several of them did seem readable to me.