The weirdness of text based interaccions.
Published: 2006-12-27
Category: Life and stuff
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Language: [English]
page views: 234

I need to implement something like a CAPTCHAs system for the new frontend for this blog. However capchas are just one possible solucion for this problem, and honestly not all elegant or fun.


CAPTCHAS are made for to prevent Bot based spam in the comment part of a website by presenting a puzzle that is easy to solve by humans but hard for computers. Normal CAPTCHAS look like distorted letters and the site asks you to write down the visible letters.

Anyway, I was looking for alternatives, and came across this little piece.. It is interesting that it's hard to convice people by messages alone that one is not a chat-bot of some kind.

At least it made my day.

"How I failed the Turing test

Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.

I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:

I consistently fail to be perceived as human."