On 10/8/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Captchas aren't limited to pattern matching and speech recognition. When computers catch up to humans enough to make captchas obsolete, it's time to let them write the encyclopedia.
Except the point isn't finding some place where computers are stupider than people, it's finding some place where computers are stupider than people *and other computers can tell the difference*. You could ask the visitor to have a little chat with you, and thirty seconds would tell *you* the difference; but it wouldn't tell your computer anything. Computers can write encyclopedia articles that are perfectly good and high-quality . . . as far as other computers can tell.
In the not-so-distant future, I think we're going to have to give up on captchas altogether and just rely on some basic throttling, spam blacklists, and human oversight. But we aren't there yet. At the very least, captchas add an extra barrier to spam, for now.