I am a robot

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, December 5, 2006 6:36pm

Are you familiar with CAPTCHAs?

They're those computer-generated images of letters or numbers, whose alphanumeric contents you're required to key in in order to prove that you're a human and not a machine.

Well, it turns out I'm a machine (or at least "more machine now than man"). Won't my mom be surprised.

Fig. A: I failed this Turing test

I know that because today I failed the Turing test (those words — yes, both of them — are the "T" in "CAPTCHA") required in order to send an e-mail to an Earthlink account.

I realize that simple CAPTCHAs, such as a black-and-white number sequence in a single font, can be hacked pretty easily. Which has led some people, such as Earthlink, to devise ever more complicated images full of various colors, fonts, and other psychadelia. It's like trying to read a MySpace page.

But I think this particular front of the war may have to be ceded to the machines and the spammers who program them. Because I'm not sure what the actual letters are in the CAPTCHA presented to me (Fig. A).

I know this much: it's not "TNPDNnH". My next guess would have been "TNFDNnH", but I was instead presented with a different CAPTCHA, the contents of which were slightly more readable.

Or am I being too narrow in only considering the Latin alphabet? Is that third character actually a Cyrillic Њ or Ю? It bears some resemblance to ట (the Telugu letter tta, I'm told), but it could be one of those ણ (the Gujarati letter nna) I'm always hearing about. I'm not sure how artistic the Telugu or Gujarati get with their serifs. Look, my point here is this: I am capable of wasting a lot of time looking at Unicode characters, if not perhaps capable of measuring the similarity of glyphs.

(And yes, they did provide an audio option for visually impaired users, although it didn't work in Firefox. Nice. And when I got the sound to work in Internet Explorer, I heard an (intentionally?) computer-mangled voice that, frankly, scared me with its robot-in-distress-error-error-I'm-dying qualities.)

Still, I went to college, people! If I can't read the contents of your 60s-flashback image, then lots of other people can't, either. To say nothing of the children — oh, won't someone please think of the children!

That said, I've devised a few tests I think could do a better job of separating the humans from the robots (I'm not sure how cyborgs would fare, though). You'll need to have Javascript turned on for them to work:

The first test relies on humans' ability to grasp abstract concepts:

The second test relies on humans' logic-processing abilities:

The third test relies on computers' inability to understand basic literary concepts:

This final test has the added benefit of not only screening out spammers, but also keeping Alanis Morrisette from e-mailing you.