Captcha Worth $500,000 to Inventor

The inventor of the captcha just received a $500,000 MacArthur Genius Grant:

Luis von Ahn, 28, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Von Ahn, who was born in Guatemala, helped develop CAPTCHA, a test used on many commercial Web sites to determine whether the user is human.

He also devised Google Image Labeler, a game in which two Internet users tag images in real time and are rewarded for using the same tag.

A little over a month ago, von Ahn gave a very entertaining talk on the Google campus. In that talk, he mentioned that if you could just hook his game up to Google images, and get 5,000 simultaneous players, every image in Google's index would be labeled in two months.

Programming · 2006/09/19 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Very interesting, and a congrats go out to the inventer of CAPTCHA.

#1 · Joseph A Nagy Jr · 2006/09/19

I wish I could get paid half a million for creating a pain in the ass.

#2 · Sterling Camden · 2006/09/19

Wow not bad! Congrats from here, too. I want to invent something, too :).

#3 · Gamelexi · 2006/09/20

Google Image Labeler sounds like it'll just lead to more deadbeats coming to my site to hijack images. I need to bone up on how to keep my images out of Google.

As for the MacArthur: I was so relieved that Dave "I'm not pregnant" Winer didn't get it.

#4 · Stephen · 2006/09/23

I would love to get in on the Google image game sounds like it would be alot of fun and would benefit the web users alot.

#5 · Jessica · 2006/09/25

Thats great, Captcha was really innovative and really helpful to keep spam away!

#6 · Rick · 2006/10/09