On 10/8/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Well, maybe I'm wrong. Encyclopedia writing isn't itself a captcha,
but I find it hard to believe we're going to be in a place where
computers can read anything humans can and yet don't understand
language. Humans can easily deal with missing letters and even
missing words by using context clues and common sense. Once computers
can read and understand language the task of writing an encyclopedia
seems within reach. Even if not, the task of automated
vandalism-fighting will likely improve enough to make captchas less
necessary.
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.
I mostly agree, for some value of "the not-so-distant future". Of
course, I also think in the not-so-distant future the kind of
contributions made by drive-by editors will be superceded by automated
tools, making it much more reasonable to have a thirty-second chat
required before editing can take place.
