Theresa Knott wrote:
On 3/20/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/20/06, Theresa Knott theresaknott@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry i thought a catchpa was a wiggly word _image_. What I am descirbing could easily be text.
Invent one then ;) Bear in mind that if it's multiple choice, then the robot could just have a few goes.
A colour that's the opposite of black
the number of days in a week
A pet animal that goes woof woof.
Unfortunately, Googling and word-counting is a rather powerful way of cheating at these sorts of simple general-knowledge questions:
Searching for "animal that goes woof woof". removing trivial words from the page fragments Google returns on its search page, and then counting the most common remaining words gives the following:
43: woof 9: animal 8: dog 7: goes 6: joke
for "colour that's the opposite of black" we get:
21: colour 10: black 6: opposite 6: white 5: you
If you then try the words which are not in the question, the highest rated few words tend to contain the answer to the question. Even if we try at random from the top-rated words, there's a good chance of success, which is all a bot needs.
-- Neil