captcha

Sharon Begley Reuters

2 hours ago

Reuters file

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A technology start-up said on Monday that it had come up with software that works like a human brain in one key way: it can crack CAPTCHAs, the strings of tilted, squiggly letters that websites employ to make users "prove you are human," as Yahoo! and others put it.

San Francisco-based Vicarious developed the algorithm not for any nefarious purpose and not even to sell, said co-founder D. Scott Phoenix.

Instead, he said in a phone interview, "We wanted to show we could take the first step toward a machine that works like a human brain, and that we are the best place in the world to do artificial intelligence research."

The company has not submitted a paper describing its methodology to an academic journal, which makes it difficult for outside experts to evaluate the claim. Vicarious offers a demonstration of its technology at http://vicarious.com, showing its algorithm breaking CAPTCHAs from Google and eBay's PayPal, among others, but at least one expert was not impressed.

"CAPTCHAs have been around since 2000, and since 2003 there have been stories every six months claiming that computers can break them," said computer scientist Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, a co-developer of CAPTCHAs and founder of tech start-up reCAPTCHA, which he sold to Google in 2009. "Even if it happens with letters, CAPTCHAs will use something else, like pictures" that only humans can identify against a distorting background.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. They are based on the standard set in 1950 by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950: a machine can be deemed intelligent only if its performance is indistinguishable from a person's.

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Computer cracks CAPTCHAs in step toward artificial intelligence