Turing, Internet Security and Digital Libraries

Turing's test was originally intended to determine whether computers could be considered "intelligent" or "think" - if one could not distinguish a human from a computer then the computer was considered "intelligent", leaving completely aside whether or not this meant the computer was actually "thinking", which is a vague term. This plays an important role in artificial intelligence programs. However Turing's test has also become important for internet/computer security in the use of CAPTCHAs, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Text to Tell Computers and Humans apart". These are those distorted letters you see in registering for certain websites that you need to copy - humans can recognize these letters, while generally computer programs cannot. Now, here's a link that describes another use for the Turing Test, dubbed reCAPTCHAs which is directly related to digitization of books and manuscripts: Through reCAPTCHAs multiple computer users can be used to identify words in print that OCR (optical character recognition) often cannot understand because of fuzziness in the original, underlined text, and marginalia. This is interesting collaborative effort, depending upon the cooperation of strangers, and their agreement with each other. One wonders what its implications could be for various archives and private libraries, such as those of Nietzsche, etc. where books often include marginalia. One wonders whether there will be a future use for handwritten notebooks that have to be deciphered.