Captcha FAIL: Researchers Crack the Web's Most Popular Turing Test

Captcha is the the gold standard for Turing tests on the web: Whenever an online form wants to check if you're a human being and not a spambot, it asks you to decipher one or two distorted words, presented as images. But what if there was a way for machines to defeat it?

That's exactly what researchers at Vicarious AI say they've done. In trying to develop a machine that thinks like a human — a multi-decade project — the small team of computer scientists says they have their first breakthrough: A computer that can process visual information similar to a human. That brings with it the ability to solve Captcha from the major web services of Google, Yahoo and PayPal up to 90% of the time. Read more...