Whenever I want to revel in human superiority over machines, I remember that no artificial intelligence yet design can read handwriting, or even, for that matter, those bendy letters and numbers that sites put up to protect themselves from bot intruders.

But it does raise an interesting question. What is it that allows us to look at a bendy a, or an a in someone else's handwriting, and yet recognise it as as a? How are we able to abstract the Platonic ur-a from all the various outward manifestations of said letter we encounter in our lives? If we could design a bot that could somehow abstract in this way, we'd have cracked a major AI issue

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

I think it is because it is not binary. It is analog and analogue thinking that allows us to see a choo choo in a cloud, a bear in an asterism, or a clock in a Salvador Dali painting.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily avaiable to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

Douglas R Hofstadter: on seeing A's and seeing As

Edit: especially for searchers: the keyword here, what a "bendy letter blockade" is probably better known as, is "CAPTCHA" awfully acronymized from "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (Wikipedia: CAPTCHA).

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I am impressed by this ability too. I am really challenged to decipher some people's handwriting, and yet, by context, I can usually make sense of it. Beyond that though, I don't know why, other than it has something to do with pattern recognition.

The legibility of my handwriting varies considerably. Some of my notes will be done in block letters and they look like they they were printed with some sort of stencil - very consistent letter shapes and sizes, and possibly machine-readable.

But then there are times when I'm in a real hurry, and they look like chicken scratch. For example, my shorthand for words ending with "ation" is to simply replace those letters with a line that may be straight, or wavy.

situ____

or

situ~~~

It would be a good program that deciphers that.

ETA: Looks like an interesting article, 01~~~~

Not to mention we'd have created a tool that will assure everyone of receiving more spam. Careful what you wish for!

SPAM^TM is a trademark owned by Hormel and the name of a product that helped America win World War II in the Pacific theater.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

But back to the topic, seriously! I am reminded of something that I saw recently. It was a display in a store window for a brand of pizza called Phillipe's. The first letter was a line drawing of a chef's hat. I think that after seeing the rest of the name, ...hillipe's and from the context I knew the hat had to also be the letter 'P'. That's two things that computer programs are bad at handling, context and ambiguity. The first could be taken care of with dictionary searching. The second cannot be anticipated in advance; chef's hats are not in the domain of character recognition programs. The program would have to "hypothesize" a 'P' and see if it could be found within the hat.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Actually, they put it in all caps. SPAM. If you don't, it is clear that you mean the irksome e-mail that you get unprompted. I believe they've sued; I believe they've lost.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

There's an arms-race going between CAPTCHA designers and designers of OCR software to break it.
It looks like the current state is that if a human gets it right every time, the machine can break it.
To avoid automated bypassing, they currently have to make the text so hard to read that I fail half the time.
Don't stop to pat your back too much, the machines are not far behind you.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

Ars Technica: Gone in 60 seconds: Spambot cracks Live Hotmail CAPTCHA

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Nxet, I wodner if word recgonition will be aded to the crypotgrahps. Then comes faces, no doubt.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Those would drive Gillianren wild.

What, the spelling errors? Other than that, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

ETA: Oh. I get it now. All they'd have to do is run spellcheck, wouldn't they? It catches those errors.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Wouldn't a better "CAPTCHA" be one that gives you words to desipher, but the "key" is actually something infered by the words.

Like the image cypher is "Red Green Blue"
and the key is "The words listed are all ______" (key = colors)

I mean, even if a bot decyphered the image, then it'd have to read the logic question and make the inference.

But it doesn't matter. There's companies now that have rooms full of people that do nothing but answer the CAPTCHA's for the bots, for a fee. Spam is big business on both sides of the sword.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

Because dumb people like me wouldn't be able to figure it out.

I've used tablet PC software (on Toshibas, HPs, Lenovas) for a few years. I can take notes in handwriting, save them, and the search feature can find all instances of where I wrote a particular (typed) word or phrase, fairly reliably, without much training. I was impressed.

1. captcha has to be auto-generated.
2. a bot leveraging GOOGLE would beat it (I'm thinking of the bot that could solve 80% of crossword puzzle entries using Google).

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

A computer would be confused by the spelling errors, but a human has far superior pattern recognition, and will often not be confused.

The Galaxy Zoo folks have much to say about this since they have advanced leaps and bounds using human pattern recognition over computer pattern recognition.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

So I take it the Turing test is full of it?

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

I dunno, I failed it