CAPTCHA

I have previously blogged about how I disliked those pages which required one to complete a CAPTCHA. Half the time I couldn't pass the test! Since then Mark has blogged about reCAPTCHA and I have looked up what CAPTCHA means - completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. Not knowing what a Turing test was I looked it up on Wikipedia - "The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test."

I just love the idea of a human trying to appear human!

It seems that the pages I visit have now demonstrated their humanity in a different way - through compassion (not something for which computers are generally noted). Since I did that posting I've only had a single CAPTCHA that wasn't easy. Here, for example, are the latest three as I posted comments on GB's blog.