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Research into AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence, has proceed at an incredible pace in the last century or so. However, we are still nearly as far as we ever were from creating the first truly functional android. I have no doubt that, had he lived to today, Isaac Asimov would be astonished although perhaps not surprised at the speed with which his stories have become reality. Unfortunately, tales of thinking machines and positronic brains remain nothing more then tales. Nevertheless, despite the lack of intelligence with which our computers usually act, they do occasionally show human-like insights and actions. To give you one example, look at how robots can be created to browse the internet. Not physical robots, of course, but small programs that can go online and surf the web. Used most commonly be search engines, these little scripts can read pages almost as well as a human can. Although our computers remain unable to communicate through speech, and are physically very different from us, you could well argue that they are still able to read the news. As the internet grows, web spiders and surfing robots become ever more common, especially as the amount of data available make it more important then ever that we find some way to manage it and find what we are looking for. Programs can be created that allow not only searching the web, but also interaction with it. Meanwhile, although everyone who has a page wants people to visit it, for those of us who are running businesses online those visitors are truly essential. Particularly with sites such as forums or blogs, a huge volume of robots is a very bad thing. It is easy for a spammer to create a program that will log onto hundreds of forums, and post thousands of annoying messages. This is why it is vital that only humans can use the forms you provide. You can add little tags to your pages to ban robots, but of course, the robots you are worried about are hardly going to pay attention to this. So you need to find some way of preventing anyone who isn't human from accessing your site. So, what is the one thing that a human can do, but a computer cannot. Ok, setting aside the obvious, it's character recognition. Computers cannot read text in an image. So, what you need, is to include some text in an image and have the user type it in. This is known as a CAPTCHA- a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. This is from the famous Turing Test, where Alan Turing proposed that to be considered intelligent, a computer must be able to communicate indistinguishably from a human through a common medium such as text. All you have to do is install a basic script onto your website, which will generate the image, and block any robots from gaining access. It's hardly difficult to do, and well worth the effort for the trouble it will save weeding out annoying comments from your forum. So, can your computer read the news? Well, yes, as long as there isn't a CAPTCHA in the way. Unfortunately, it will be a while yet before any computers can truly be considered intelligent, and even longer before we see any real androids so I suppose I have to conclude with, no, robots really cannot read newspapers.
Article Source: http://www.philvault.com
Oleg is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his ingenious new Smart CAPTCHA technology.
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