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A Vision For a World Free of CAPTCHAs

An anonymous reader writes "Slate argues that we're going about verifying humans on the Web all wrong: 'As Alan Turing laid out in the 1950 paper that postulated his test, the goal is to determine whether a computer can behave like a human, not perform tasks that a human can. The reason CAPTCHAs have a term limit is that they measure ability, not behavior. ... the random, circuitous way that people interact with Web pages — the scrolling and highlighting and typing and retyping — would be very difficult for a bot to mimic. A system that could capture the way humans interact with forms algorithmically could eventually relieve humans of the need to prove anything altogether.' Seems smart, if an algorithm could actually do that."

2 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Anything you can do, I can do... by name*censored* · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It seems to me that if a bot can check whether or not a person is "acting" human, then it must follow that the bot knows what rules are involved with "acting human". If it understands this, then there's nothing stopping someone from telling the computer to obey those rules itself, which means "AI". The main problem with Artificial Intelligence is that we don't have a complete and fully accurate list of rules for what a human can/will do - in other words, we're unpredictable. And it's not like we can't have computers act unpredictably, it's just that we don't know how to make them act unpredictably in the same way a human would act unpredictably.

    So, in other words, even if someone could make this test, it would render itself redundant by design..

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    Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
    1. Re:Anything you can do, I can do... by name*censored* · · Score: 0, Redundant

      redundant

      *Ahem*.

      --
      Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive