AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas

And is that Coke or Diet Coke?

Do you have an alternative to suggest?

From the article:

    "Captcha" stands for "completely automated
    Turing test to tell computers and humans apart."

No it doesn't - where's the word that starts with "P"?

According to Wikipedia "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (and is apparently a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University, which I didn't know.) Even that's a really bad backronym.

Google's reCAPTCHA page[0] says the same thing, and even attributes it:

    The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test
    To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis
    von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of
    Carnegie Mellon University.

That should then be CAPTTTTCAHA. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Given the term CAPTCHA it seems that a "better" (by some definition) backronym would be:

    Completely Automated Process to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

At least with that one only the particles "to" and "and" are left out of the abbreviation.

More on topic though, I long for the day when off-the-shelf systems that even script-kiddies can use are able to break CAPTCHAs with ease - that's when they'll finally die. TicketMaster gave up on using the standard CAPTCHAs earlier this year[1], and I'd love to see something better replace it.

[0] http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21260007

We use honeypot field and timegate trap on our site forms - so far very successfully.

It'd be interesting to know more about this approach. In particular:

> One big difference in Vicarious’s approach, says cofounder Dileep George, is that its system can be trained with moving images rather than only static ones.

Does this imply they teach it how the shapes of numbers change, for easier detection?