I thought I'd mention a really nifty idea for making captchas (images that humans convert to text in order to gain access to a site) useful. They're annoying and time consuming (relatively speaking) and automatic image analysis can solve less well designed systems. Well, someone came up with the idea of using words that OCR systems have trouble with in conjunction with another (more easily understood) image, and using the results not only for authentication but for distributed OCR assistance on converting texts to electronic form. This means that while captchas may still be annoying, they have a potential to be useful as well :-).
http://recaptcha.net/ Maybe we could take classic mathematical works in the public domain, scan them, and use this technique to convert them into TeX documents :-). If regular OCR text is hard, a mathematical formula -> TeX translator will be WAY beyond most of these systems. :-) And we could use the results to make literate documents for Axiom, since it would be public domain content being translated. The University of Michigan has apparently scanned the 1910 version of the Principia Mathematica and put it online as scanned pages of pdfs: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=umhistmath;idno=AAT3201.0001.001 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=umhistmath;idno=AAT3201.0002.001 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=umhistmath;idno=AAT3201.0003.001 Based on their site it looks like we would need permission to do anything with these images: "These pages may be freely searched and displayed. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please go to http://www.umdl.umich.edu/ for more information." However, if they were interested enough to give us permission to use the images for the effort, perhaps we could turn the anti-spam measures for the Axiom wiki into a simultaneous effort to produce a public domain TeX version of the Principia Mathematica, making the wiki itself serve (if indirectly) the idea of literate programming :-). I doubt the translations would be perfect, since TeX commands may require context, but I wonder if it could be made useful none the less? Bill, as our resident wiki guru do you know anything about this idea of captcha utilization? Cheers, CY P.S. - I didn't know there was so much cool stuff out there of this sort - archive.org also has a version of Newton's Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica - http://www.archive.org/details/philonatrualprin04newtrich ____________________________________________________________________________________ Park yourself in front of a world of choices in alternative vehicles. Visit the Yahoo! Auto Green Center. http://autos.yahoo.com/green_center/ _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
