They say that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but I think it comes out higher than several other things such as Chris Evans, Allen Carr and drawing attention to word verifications when commenting on blogs. (Luckily I don't have Wordver so am not insulting any of my lovely, lovely commenters).
"Captcha", the technology requiring computer users to decipher a distorted text seems to have been around forever but was actually only invented in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, the pioneer of "human computation". It relies on the fact that it is very difficult for a computer programme to decipher distorted words and is still an area where the human brain comes out on top along with Articulated Lorries getting stuck under bridges with Sat Nav.
Last year, von Ahn started to feel guily about the 200 million Wordvers a day that were wasting so much time and came up with ReCaptcha, a system aimed at harnessing all that brain activity. It draws random words from the Internet Archive's book digitization project and The New York Times archive and presents them as Wordvers for people to decipher. Every word is used several times and when sufficient people agree the ReCaptcha database returns the digitized word to its rightful sentence. Remarkably, whilst it was taking typists 10 years to digitize 27 years of NYT articles, von Ahn's software is processing 129 years in less than 24 months.
The acronym "Captcha" is supposed to stand for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", although it is actually a reverse Turing test. The famous "Turing Test" was described by father of Computing Alan Turing in 1950 and sets the challenge for a computer to be able to mimic human communication remotely well enough to fool a real human. He predicted that this would be possible by the year 2000 but then we all assumed by that year we would all be walking around with personal communicators and living in a giant tent next to the Thames.
"Captcha", the technology requiring computer users to decipher a distorted text seems to have been around forever but was actually only invented in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, the pioneer of "human computation". It relies on the fact that it is very difficult for a computer programme to decipher distorted words and is still an area where the human brain comes out on top along with Articulated Lorries getting stuck under bridges with Sat Nav.
Last year, von Ahn started to feel guily about the 200 million Wordvers a day that were wasting so much time and came up with ReCaptcha, a system aimed at harnessing all that brain activity. It draws random words from the Internet Archive's book digitization project and The New York Times archive and presents them as Wordvers for people to decipher. Every word is used several times and when sufficient people agree the ReCaptcha database returns the digitized word to its rightful sentence. Remarkably, whilst it was taking typists 10 years to digitize 27 years of NYT articles, von Ahn's software is processing 129 years in less than 24 months.
The acronym "Captcha" is supposed to stand for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", although it is actually a reverse Turing test. The famous "Turing Test" was described by father of Computing Alan Turing in 1950 and sets the challenge for a computer to be able to mimic human communication remotely well enough to fool a real human. He predicted that this would be possible by the year 2000 but then we all assumed by that year we would all be walking around with personal communicators and living in a giant tent next to the Thames.
The Turing Test has still not been passed properly by the software programmes which regularly attempt to exhibit intelligent and interactive human communication. That's no surprise really, as Drew has failed the Turing Test miserably all his life.
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6 witty and incisive ripostes:
Bridges have sat navs? You live and learn.
obviously computers are not human surely you don't need them to take a test to prove it - can't most people tell by the shape they are?
As usual I drove home from Tameside tonight along 'Alan Turing Way'.
Some of the machines moving along there in the rush hour were seriously failing the test set by those funny yellow boxes.
Alan wasn't available for comment.
Oddly, "turing" looks as if it could easily be a word verification thingy.
I don't think Alan Carr's that funny either.
Dave: Glad to be of assistance.
Ziggi: There's quite a few Apple shaped people in these parts. I'm not sure it's a terminal condition though.
Kaz: It sounds a bit like VenTura Boulevard. Peter Kay uses the Turing system to let his mother know he's got home alright.
Tim: I knew you'd spot the Baudrillardian Simulcrumesque references in my nebulous parameters.
Richard: Give him his due, though. He did help Drew to give up smoking.
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