What if a million people all worked together to accomplish something?

It started with a simple idea, how do you stop computers from flooding a website with an automated program?  The answer was text recognition known as a CAPTCHA.  The annoying picture of text that humans can translate into actual characters of text.  Which wasn't a bad idea, but it wasted 500,000 man-hours of human effort per day.

The next step was to invent ReCAPTCHA to use those hours into translating old books into digital format.  ReCAPTCHA requires two words (one that the computer knows and the other it does not) and by comparing answers with other humans, it can report with some confidence what the second word actually is written digitally.  ReCAPTCHA, it is estimated to be “the equivalent of 1500 people working full-time and transcribing 60 words per minute,”   It is also fairly accurate, normal OCR is about 84% accurate, when combined with ReCAPTCHA, the accuracy is 99.1%, on-par with professional translation. 100 million words are digitalized everyday using this process, the equivalent of 2 and half million books per year, one word at a time.  It is estimated that roughly 10% of Earth's population has been called to help translate a book into a digital format. In comparison, large projects like going to the moon, the panama cannel, the pyramids of Egypt, all are done on the order of 100,000 people.  Because it is difficult to coordinate beyond that in the pre-internet age.

A new process is being developed called Duolingo.  It's ambitious project is to get 100 million people to help translate the internet into different languages.  The two problems is a lack of motivation and a lack of bilingual people that have the skill to do it.  The solution was quite clever, get people who want to learn another language and while teaching them to learn another language, use their new ability to translate small pieces of the web.  It starts slowly, using simple sentences and gives you the literal translation for each word.  The amazing thing about this, is people can learn a new language by this method.  It is more interesting (uses actual, real web content) and it is as accurate as professional translators.

To give you an idea of how powerful this is, it is estimated that 500 million dollars worth of translation (translating the remaining 80% of Wikipedia that hasn't been translated into Spanish) could be done in 5 weeks (with 100,000 users).  And because it is free, the poor can learn a new language rather than spending $500 (the cost to buy language learning software) by using the effort that they would have spent learning a new language to help translate the web.

This is what the power of Amplified Intelligence has to offer us.

Sources:

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.htm

http://www.sitepoint.com/recaptcha-awesome-use-of-wasted-time-that-works/

http://duolingo.com/