[TAG] I'm utterly gobsmacked

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello,

On Sun, 25 Jul 2010, Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
> as I can't think of a single valid reason why anyone would even
> *want* to OCR a CAPTCHA, I guess I don't need to.

OCR is one of the applications of computer vision.

The computer vision and artificial intelligence guys are extremely
interested in figuring out whether CAPTCHA's are truly beyond the
capability of "automated" cracking. In some cases CAPTCHA's have been
cracked by programmes. For example,

 http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/

Remember that CAPTCHA stands for:

 Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and
 Humans Apart

So it is an attempt to have a computer generate a Turing Test which
another computer cannot solve. If it is indeed possible to do this
then AI would have failed!

Regards,

Kapil.
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