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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Now that programs are better and better at solving CAPTCHA - that means that correct CAPTCHA input will mean the opposite from what it means now. Since programs are better at solving CAPTCAH than humans, correct input (3/3 for example) will mean it's a robot. Thus, CAPTCHA becomes relevant again.

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And how would you deal with the fact that an algorithm could always intentionally provide the wrong answer? It's a losing game.

Presumably humans would see some pattern that isn't there. So you have to get the correct wrong result.

Ooh, that's interesting. I was just talking with somebody yesterday about how his bosses had him spend six months trying to make a new financial system bug-compatible with an old financial system, one to which they had lost the source code. They eventually gave up and just kept using the old system so they could be consistent with previous publications.

Making something bug-compatible with the human vision system might be much harder than pure recognition.

My statement was mostly tongue in cheek. On the other hand, "what does that cloud look like?" would be an interesting captcha.

Oh, and I might be better at the imagination ones than the current crop, especially on my phone.

The endgame solution is to let humans judge other humans. In 5 years, you will be interrogated every time you post to HN. The machines are here to make our lives hell...

That's not the endgame. Once machines pass the Turing test, it will be impossible to filter humans vs. machines.

What if you are interrogated offline? What if the police visits you every 3 months to make sure you haven't turned to a robot?

"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping."

(http://www.trussel.com/bladerun.htm)

The question is: does it matter whether the participants are human if they are intelligent enough to contribute. I think we'll eventually end up in situation where captchas actually filter out humans :)

Yeah, I've had that weird experience of spambots taking text excerpts and posting it to avoid detection, but it's actually relevant information...

In 5 years, you will be interrogated every time you post to HN

But that's how it already is! :) Eventually spam content will either blend in to be relevant and attractive (we can see hints of it in new youtube ads system, but that's matching to ads only, not generating) or it will be analyzed and scrapped (along with other comments) by other equally intelligent systems. So machines will judge both machines and humans equally I think.

When it becomes impossible to distinguish computer intelligence from human intelligence, do we really want to stop the computers from commenting?

If a computer algorithm can create a more informed relevant comment than a person, maybe i would prefer to see the artificial comment.

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