The reCAPTCHA Rorschach Test
Even if you’re not familiar with the contrived acronym CAPTCHA, you’ve probably encountered the concept from time to time online. It’s a reasonably reliable way for websites that allow user comments to distinguish a human from a spambot, and thus it’s one form of Turing test. So far so good. In fact I use one such CAPTCHA service, reCAPTCHA, for comments on this site.
I like reCAPTCHA because, aside from the fact that it works (most of the time, though you may guess that one of its failings has prompted this posting, and you may be correct), it is part of a Carnegie Mellon University project to digitize books. (You see, humans completing the CAPTCHAs help to decipher words that the OCR software chokes on.)
Tonight I was going over various pages of my site, attempting to apply yet another layer of polish to everything, and I discovered the most bizarre abomination of a CAPTCHA I have ever seen. I grabbed a screenshot, and here it is. Good luck with that.
Comments
Ben Maurer said:
Hi,
I’m one of the recaptcha developers. Sometimes a little bit of OCR junk like that slips in as one of the words to be read by OCR. In the screenshot you posted “sults” would have been accepted as the correct answer.
We’re always developing code to help prevent this type of thing from getting through, but it’s obviously never perfect.
room34 said:
Thanks for the comment. I hope you didn’t take this post as an insult to the work you’re doing — like I said, I like reCAPTCHA and for the most part it’s been working great for me.