A CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public
Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, is a program that can generate
and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.
Computing
has become so pervasive and computerized tasks and services so commonplace,
that the need for increased levels of security has led to the development of
CAPTCHA for computers to ensure that they are dealing with humans in situations
where human interaction is essential to security. Activities such as online
commerce transactions, search engine submissions, Web polls, Web registrations,
free e-mail service registration and other automated services are subject to
software programs that mimic the behavior of humans in order to skew the
results of the automated task or perform malicious activities, such as
gathering e-mail addresses for spamming or ordering hundreds of tickets to a
concert.
In order to validate the digital transaction, with the
CAPTCHA system, the user is presented with a distorted word typically placed on
top of a distorted background. The user must type the word into a field in
order to complete the process. Computers have a difficult time decoding the
distorted words while humans can easily decipher the text.
Or so you thought..
Vicarious, a startup developing artificial intelligence
software, announced October 27, 2013 that its algorithms can now reliably solve
modern CAPTCHAs. A CAPTCHA scheme is considered broken if an algorithm is able
to reach a precision of at least 1%. By leveraging core insights from machine
learning and neuroscience, the Vicarious AI achieves success rates up to 90% on
modern CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Captcha.com, and others. This
advancement renders text-based CAPTCHAs no longer effective as a Turing test.
Vicarious is an artificial intelligence company that uses
the computational principles of the brain to build software that can think and
learn like a human. The company believes understanding how the brain creates
intelligence is the ultimate scientific challenge. Vicarious has a long term
strategy for developing human level artificial intelligence, and it starts with
building a brain-like vision system. Modern CAPTCHAs provide a snapshot of the
challenges of visual perception, and solving those in a general way required us
to understand how the brain does it.
Solving CAPTCHA is the first public demonstration of the
capabilities of Vicarious’ Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) technology.
Although still many years away, the commercial applications of RCN will have
broad implications for robotics, medical image analysis, image and video
search, and many other fields.
by: Jessica Wiggins
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