You may have come across those colourfully distorted texts at registration forms, logins or when trying to access a website online. These are known as CAPTCHAs and they are used to prevent automated system such as bot programs from accessing the sites that have CAPTCHA protection.
CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It was a name coined by computer scientists in 2003. It was earlier developed by AltaVista team (a search engine established in 1995 which later lost ground to Google) in 1997. But in 2003, the second team of computer scientists gave birth to CAPTCHA.
CAPTCHA vs reCAPTCHA
But with the spammers and computer programs getting more sophisticated reCAPTCHA was born. reCAPTCHA is like CAPTCHA but made to be more user-friendly. Its function like its predecessor is to protect websites from bots that spam. While doing this job it also assists in digitising the archives of The New York Times and Google Books. These are books that are too illegible to be scanned. So far, over 13million articles have been archived till this day.
Source: reCAPTCHA test showing two words with the old slogan "Stop Spam. Read Books" that was removed in 2014
In 2014 Google announced that the squiggled text tests would be reduced to a single checkbox with the sentence "I'm not a robot"
Google: I'm not a robot reCAPTCHA test
This reduces the stress of typing in those distorted letters and numbers of the old CAPTCHA and improve its robustness.
CAPTCHAs have long relied on the inability of robots to solve distorted text. However, our research recently showed that today’s Artificial Intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy. Thus distorted text, on its own, is no longer a dependable test.
“For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience,” says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google’s Captcha team. “They basically get a free pass. You can solve the catptcha without having to solve it.” Says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google’s Captcha team. Source
Google further says that it could differentiate between a person and an automated program from the way the cursor is moved prior to checking the box.
For tablets and smartphones users, there is usually a collection of images where it is required to make distinctions and click a particular image. It is easy for humans but may be tough for bots.
For example, here is a picture of a cat and you are required to match other cats by clicking on all images of cat.
A Summary of the Importance of reCAPTCHA
It stops spam and other automated systems sending out spams from attacking the system.
It helps solve artificial intelligence by using database of solved labelled images to train Machine Learning systems
It helps to digitize books that computers cannot read through the different words solved daily ( in millions). The old books are now preserved online for readers.
- It helps make maps more accurate as images of street addresses (visible on Street View in Google Maps) are solved via verification.