Image Caption: The Vicarious Team. From left to right: D. Scott Phoenix, Wolfgang Lehrach, Ken Kansky (top), CC Laan, Dileep George, Bhaskara Marthi. Credit: Adam David Cohen

April Flowers for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

There have been movies and books around for quite a while depicting Artificial Intelligence (AI) software and machines that become self aware. Perhaps the most famous was The Terminator movie franchise, but it is by no means the only example. Until today, there seemed to be little hope of that ever happening. Vicarious, a California startup company that develops AI software, has announced that the algorithms used by its software can now reliably solve modern CAPTCHAs, including Googles reCAPTCHA. Googles reCAPTCHA is the worlds most widely used test of a machines ability to act human.

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are those little boxes with random phrases or words or numbers at the bottom of a web pages login. Until now,the ability to use them correctly proved you were a human logging in, not a computer set to spam the company, because they are specifically designed to be easy for humans and hard for computer programs.

Modern CAPTCHAs provide a representative snapshot of many of the problems encountered in generic visual perception: large variation among instances of objects, segmentation that requires understanding of the objects, and contextual disambiguation, said Vicarious researchers.

Our strategy is to solve CAPTCHAs using algorithms that are instances of a general framework for solving problems found in human perception and reasoning. This allows us to transfer our learning from solving CAPTCHAs to more general problems, like vision.

If, according to a Stanford University study, an algorithm is able to reach a precision of at least one percent, a CAPTCHA scheme is considered broken by the machine. Vicarious AI uses core insights from machine learning and neuroscience to achieve a success rate of up to 90 percent on modern CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Captcha.com and others, rending text-based CAPTCHAs ineffective as a Turing Test.

A Turing Test is an assessment of a machines ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equal to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Alan Turing introduced the idea in a paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence published in 1950. The original purpose of the Turing test was to determine whether a computer is able to fool a human interrogator into believing that it is also human, however, a newer standard interpretation is used today. The standard interpretation asks whether a computer is able to imitate a human. That is where Vicarious AI comes in.

Recent AI systems like IBMs Watson and deep neural networks rely on brute force: connecting massive computing power to massive datasets. This is the first time this distinctively human act of perception has been achieved, and it uses relatively minuscule amounts of data and computing power. The Vicarious algorithms achieve a level of effectiveness and efficiency much closer to actual human brains, said Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix.

The Vicarious RCN is not the first to break CAPTCHAs, but it is the first to do it reliably and with such a high success rate. Early efforts to create CAPTCHAs were poorly designed and easy to solve, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or standard machine learning methods. Modern CAPTCHAs, like Googles reCAPTCHA, are designed so well that these approaches have a zero percent accuracy. Single CAPTCHAs have been broken on a rare basis by researchers exploiting bugs or idiosyncrasies in the generation process; however, such simple programs dont attempt to understand the image. The errors they exploit are easily patched by fixing the CAPTCHA generator.

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New Artificial Intelligence Cracks CAPTCHAs