OR: Using CAPTCHA for scientific purpose
Most of us probably know by now the meaning of Captcha and what it is used for.
But did you know that Captcha is also used as a tool of creating highly intelligent computers, better bots that can crack Captchas more easily?
“Can Computers Read” is a very interesting post by Aiden Fennelly about computers artificial intelligence.
He claims computers are intelligent and dumb at the same time.
Why? Becaues humans have perceptive intelligence while computers have artificial intelligence.
Confused?
The following example should clarify his statement:
When a human sees a tiger in the bush he’ll recognize both the tiger and the bush even if he sees only a part of it, its tail, for instance. A computer will fail to recognize the tiger by its tail ’cause it doesn’t have the skill of abstract thinking.
That explains why Captchas can tell bots and human apart with quite high accuracy.
However, Baird and Lopresti, two professors researching the field of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, regard this particular software as a slow procedure of minimizing the gap between artificial intelligence and artificial perception. In due time, we’ll have computers with abstract thinking similar to human beings.
In order to develop more advanced computer’s abstract thinking, Baird “works on creating more advanced OCR software and more complicated Captchas”.
As a matter of fact, complicated Captchas develop more intelligent computers…
What a paradox…
