Computer Graphics: How you are helping out.

The above image is a figure I'm sure most of us are familiar with as we have to fill them out in sites to make accounts or post comments. And whenever I see one I get a little worked up as I know I'm probably going to fail entering the correct values on the first try for whatever reason. In any case it is a good system as it stops spammers from spamming webpages since computer software is currently not smart enough to be able to decipher the above image as text. And that's because of the nature of how text is written without any consistency due to text being spaced differently for any number of reasons. On the other hand, there is consistency in the letters you are reading right now since each letter is exactly the same as the previous version due to the way computer programs display the letters we type.

And to go further into what the above image is, it is "reCAPTCHA [which] is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows." (read more at: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore). And what this means is that by solving these CAPTCHAs you are helping out programs in their conversion process of images into text so that all books can be available online in the future so that we do not lose them as in the case of the burning of the Library of Alexandria in which a considerably amount of knowledge was lost due to a lack of additional copies of works.