If you answered NO, there's 90% probablity you passed the test many times unknowing its name so far.
If you surf the web very too often, or have an email ID with yahoo or if you have typed comments on friend's blogs.. you would have probably passed a test called the 'CAPTCHA Test'
One basic form of the test is nothing but simple text coded inside a graphic image which the website's form asks you to visually see and type into a form textbox for validating that you are not a spam robotic program and that your form submission may be accepted.
I thought it was a freaky, sudden, idea of some webForm developer from the other portion of the world where I don't live.
I found about the inventors of this idea from dotnet247.com
dotnet247.com in itself is a popular website conceptualised on a simple idea of providing web interface for microsoft news posts. Unlike other websites which just implement the test with a graphic, this website has a credit link to CAPTCHA website.
The CAPTCHA test as per the website has many forms other than the common form generating text interlaced into an image (this is called gimp). There are tests which show four blocks in a pattern and you select one which doesnt seem part of the pattern, which is something very difficult to code as logic in computers and so only humans can answer.
The CAPTCHA Project is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and they did this for Yahoo which was then much bugged with spam robot programs generating and submitting lot of forms for email creation.
Is it that the CAPTCHA cannot be broken by computer programs?
The website says,
"Greg Mori and Jitendra Malik of the University of California at Berkeley have written a program that can solve ez-gimpy(one test of CAPTCHA) with accuracy 83%. Thayananthan, Stenger, Torr, and Cipolla of the Cambridge vision group have written a program that can achieve 93% correct recognition rate against ez-gimpy, and Malik and Mori have matched their accuracy. Their programs represent siginifcant advancements to the field of computer vision."
" ... field of computer vision."
Hey! are they meaning computer 'eyes' kind of stuff. Cool! What do you think?
Read more at the CAPTCHA website, and learn about other interesting projects at Carnegie mellon like the 'Peekaboom!'
Link: The CAPTCHA Project
