Saturday, March 28, 2009

3D-based Captchas become reality | Crave - CNET

3D-based Captchas become reality | Crave - CNET

I'm fascinated by the idea of the CAPTCHA. Not the least of which, is the fact the CAPTCHA is an acronym. Because of the continuing risk/reward systems that all humans operate under, this convention is most probably here to stay.

What's funny to me regarding this 3D addition, is that in order to work around the system one of two things will need to happen.

1.) Spammers hire a person to do the work (and in that case, the CAPTCHA actually does exactly what it is intended to do: ensure a human is using the system.

2.) Computers are programmed to better recognize three dimensional objects from virtually any angle.

Option 2 is what intrigues me. I have to believe that someone is already working on this problem. Allbeit for use in robotics applications. If the spammers and hackers of the world decide to spend their time on option 2, the system will need to evolve again. Only this time we will have added the concept of computers recognizing three dimensional objects in the process. A process that we will need to have at somepoint in the future.

This has got me thinking, what other kinds of difficult computer recognition problems are out there? The best I can come up with at the moment is idiomatic expressions. The other problems I can come up with are already being worked on, or they've been solved (voice recognition and facial expressions recognition).

As a society we need to find ways to put value to the problems that we may hackers work on more valuable. These people spend loads of time working on a problem, so, let's give them a problem that really needs to be solved.