When character recognition software fails to decipher a word scanned in a book — when the page is yellowed or the letters are smudged, for example — Mr. von Ahn's project makes it part of a captcha.
His current projects include Deciphering Michelangelo, a book about the artist's writings and drawings, and Mute Poetry Speaking Pictures, a study of the relations among words, images, and pleasure from Plato to the Renaissance.
In 2007 he sank himself into the subject, reading a stack of books (like David Foster Wallace's "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity") and attending academic lectures where he could barely decipher a word.
Nothing, unless you're writing a book report, or a book, or deciphering the news, or trying to sound smart in an e-mail, or just killing time.
It is like having at hand a book, the language of which has still to be deciphered [ 2, 3].
There was a book by a Jourdain Society member, "Cryptanalysis of Ornithological Literature," which explained how to decipher nest locations by piecing together details from mainstream bird literature, and a photograph of a legendary early-twentieth-century egg collector, John Walpole-Bond.
The new book is called "Inferno," a title that was revealed by fans who helped decipher a social-media puzzle created to promote the book.
In a book filled with excellent quotations and concepts relevant to contemporary poetry — "The Personal," "The Political," "Form," "Ambition" — Orr, the poetry columnist for the Times Book Review, argues that poems should be loved, not deciphered.
"Decipher the book of secrets and enjoy learning ninjutsu," the company promises prospective students on its website.
Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English.
