Added CAPTCHA to Comments
Ya just can’t be a nice guy anywhere. I have had to add a CAPTCHA plug-in to this blog. I hate to have to do it, but I have to stop the spam comments.
This evening, there were 85 spam comments that I needed to delete. First of all, I don’t understand why people do this. Can they really make money selling pills and other stuff using this technique? Or do they do it just to be mean? Do you think their mothers are proud of them?
So, I added a CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It seems like it should be CAPTTTTCaHA, but even computer nerds can have poetic license, I guess. It means that when you create a comment for a post on this blog, you have to read one of those squiggly lined, curvy, confusing sets of letters that you are seeing more and more often. The theory is that only a person can read those pictures and a computer can’t. As a result, the amount of spam allowed in that is created by bots should go down.
We’ll see.
In the middle part of the 20th century, Alan Turing proposed a test for artificial intelligence in computers. He proposed that a person sat down at a computer terminal and typed in questions. The terminal would then spit out an answer. The test was to figure out whether the responses were coming from the computer or from a human being. If the computer created the answers, and the person at the terminal believed he was talking to a person, then that computer would pass the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.
The Captcha is not exactly a Turing test. It works on the assumption that only a person could read through the squiggly lines, and a computer can’t. So, if a computer could figure out something that only a person could, then I suppose it could be considered intelligent. But the test is get one computer to fool another that it is a person, not a computer trying to fool a person.
And there are way too many T’s dropped out to make it a believable acronym. I wonder if the acronym was made by a computer trying to fool us it is human?
Please add a comment and tell me what you think of the Captcha. (If you have already added post to this blog, the Captcha does not appear, because we assume you are a person.)
