making the world safe for books, puppies and hedgehogs

Every time we go to leave a comment on one of our media blogs, we encounter a CAPTCHA, the little reading test that is designed to prevent, or at least reduce, comment spam. In case you were wondering, it stands for  Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Turing here refers to Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computers. His test? He thought that computers would never have true "intelligence" but that if they could fool a human in conversation, that'd be close enough.

If a person remotely asked a question and couldn't tell
if the response was from either a computer or a person,
the computerized response would pass the Turning Test.

At any rate, CAPTCHAs have spread throughout the online world and besides combating comment spam, they also prevent online polls from getting trashed by automated computer assaults. They can be used to protect website registrations and sometimes help fight email spam, among other things.


With the millions of CATCHAs being processed each day, somebody noticed that all this effort really wasn't being fully harnessed. In response, reCAPTCHA was developed. This new upgrade took all that problem-solving energy and applied it to a problem: digitizing books. And so now millions of people a day at Facebook and countless other sites are asked to type the words that come from a scanned book and are helping to get books digitized and freely available online, like at Archive.org.

This small shift in thinking in harnessing that energy in turn cause a small revolution in the world of CAPTCHAs. Now, not only are books being digitized but CAPTCHAs are being modified to serve all sorts of needs. Users are no longer just encountering text, as programmers have shifted to image recognition. And so Petfinder.org, for example, uses the dog/cat Turing Test for its CAPTCHAs. 

And just look at all the uses for the new generation of CAPTCHAs, some useful, some goofy, some cute and some just downright bizarre, in this unexpectedly developing new medium:

This one's from the website HotOrNot.com:

Fail:

And here are a few from some math sites:

Lastly, I just wanted to leave you with yet another iteration of this emerging media: the cartoon...