Too clever to be human; or, the limitations of Turing tests

[vvvexation]

I was just faced with a CAPTCHA that included the word "finifter." Only not really, because of course they weren't actually f's, they were those old-fashioned stretched-out s's. So I typed "sinister"...but the computer didn't like my answer. :-(

(Of course, I'd suspected it wouldn't. But I do think it's a little unfair to use that sort of thing in CAPTCHAs.)

Comments

[aliothsan.livejournal.com]

Heh. I wish recaptcha had a button to report "hey, the words in this deserve human attention" for when it gives you snippets of math, or Greek, or music. And I really, really hope they have flagged all books with long S for further review...

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I also encountered some superscript today. I just typed the digits as if they weren't in superscript, but I hope they weren't actually using me as a transcriber.

[aliothsan.livejournal.com]

...that's exactly what recaptcha is, isn't it? It's trying to supplant human proofreaders for OCR. (As a volunteer for the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders, I might be taking this a little personally. ^_^)

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I thought they only did that on half the words, though. Was I wrong?

[aliothsan.livejournal.com]

Something like that, but I don't think that changes my comment? Anyway, the two words that show up in a given captcha aren't a mated pair -- they swap them around, I think.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I just meant that I hoped the one with the superscript wasn't the one they were using me to proofread.

I'm actually pretty curious about this

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Wait--why didn't it like your answer? Had a bunch of other morons typed 'finifter', and now that crap transcription is taken as the correct one?

Re: I'm actually pretty curious about this

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

That's what I can only assume happened.

[rackstraw.livejournal.com]

Now I'm half tempted to name a character Finifter but that would seem a tad transparent.

Is it true that some of those use your input as free text recognition?

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm given to understand, as per the above thread.