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

[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.