Lemur CATTA - reading comprehension instead of CAPTCHAs
lemurcatta.org
lemurcatta.org
Manually creating three options and selection one as the "right answer" won't work either, a spammer will just try three times, until he gets it right.
I don't like the affinity test - it may work for certain types of sites, but consider the case where you criticize a company on a blog, and a rep wants to reply and participate in the discussion. If he has to do a "nontrivial amount of research" to post, he's probably not going to, which would be a shame.
There aren't 504 ways (P(9,3)), but only 84 (C(9,3)), since order is irrelevant.