On 10/8/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
Captchas aren't limited to pattern matching and
speech recognition.
When computers catch up to humans enough to make captchas obsolete,
it's time to let them write the encyclopedia.
Except the point isn't finding some place where computers are stupider
than people, it's finding some place where computers are stupider than
people *and other computers can tell the difference*. You could ask
the visitor to have a little chat with you, and thirty seconds would
tell *you* the difference; but it wouldn't tell your computer
anything. Computers can write encyclopedia articles that are
perfectly good and high-quality . . . as far as other computers can
tell.
In the not-so-distant future, I think we're going to have to give up
on captchas altogether and just rely on some basic throttling, spam
blacklists, and human oversight. But we aren't there yet. At the
very least, captchas add an extra barrier to spam, for now.