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Comment by gehant | Hacker News Reader

Since reCaptcha tries to differentiate humans from computers/bots, I find it ironic that the same reCaptcha technology is being used to improve the accuracy of how computers scan text...

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Only because every time it gets stuck, it "asks" a human.

Yeah I thought the article was a little misleading on that point. They made it seem like the human input was improving the OCR algorithms.

I would think that the human input is improving the OCR algorithms. I assume that every human correction trains the OCR in some way. With enough corrections the OCR should at some point learn to distinguish between the characters it couldn't before.

Which means the technology will eventually make an algorithm so good that it can solve a CAPTCHA as well as a human, thus making itself obsolete. What other technology does that?

guns.

viruses (the biological type)

Only the ones that are too aggressive. Most viruses shoot for a very nice balance between killing the host and keeping enough of them around for the next batch.

The weirdest effect of this is that the most dangerous viruses tend to burn out. If one of those ever came along with a really long incubation time for the disease but a much longer time for contagion that might be a problem.

HIV/AIDs?

No, think Zaire Ebola with a month or two of transmission before the first symptoms. That would seriously suck.

There are horror movies that scare me much less than something like that.

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