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Comment by cooperadymas | Hacker News Reader

This has always reminded me of the pilot episode of Stargate Universe, where Eli Wallace solves a real world complex math problem in a video game. Maybe Fold.It was thought up first, but it's a fascinating concept either way. It makes a person wonder what else could be accomplished via clever crowd sourcing.

Also see Google's reCAPTCHA project: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

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That meme was featured in "The Last Starfighter" in 1984. I read the book (apparently, the movie was first).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter

Ah. So these people are responsible for japanese, greek and formulas in my capchas.. they should really have a "I can't type this" button for more efficiency.

If I can't figure out a indecipherable glyph it's usually the word they need help with and if it's not a word I usually type in "NotAWord_<random text>" for it, you only need to get the one that google knows as well right. As long as everyone doesn't type in the same thing for the indecipherable portion it won't end up in ebooks.

The top button out of the three (⟲) in the column is it.

Is it really? I thought it only gave a new capcha, without me giving a reason. I mean, there is a difference between being unable to read a word because it's so mangled and not being able to type something because I don't have that typeset installed / can't read the language.

My impression is that even though the article refers to gamers, these players are unlike most gamers in that they may have extensive knowledge of organic chemistry. The article may be over-simplifying the amount of expertise required to come up with the solution.

"Few of these players had any kind of background in biochemistry."

Nope you don't need knowledge in organic chemistry. You basically run through a tutorial on the "rules" and then you fiddle with 3D models trying to get them as packed together as possible to achieve a % which increases your score.

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