Can Androids Read The News?
by Oleg
Research into AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence, has proceed at an incredible pace in the last century or so. However, we are still nearly as far as we ever were from creating the first truly functional android. I have no doubt that, had he lived to today, Isaac Asimov would be astonished although perhaps not surprised at the speed with which his stories have become reality. Unfortunately, tales of thinking machines and positronic brains remain nothing more then tales.
So while our computers cannot talk to us, cannot think, or act as an intelligent being, they do in many ways act at least semi-intelligent. Consider the web-spider. Not a true spider, by any means, but rather a computer program designed to browse the internet and identify key pages and even phrases.
So while androids may not walk and talk, you could say that they read the news. Web-spiders are becoming ever more prolific as the internet grows, and we find we need some way to easily search it. Unfortunately, not all use the spiders' powerful searching capabilities benignly.
Computer programs can now be taught to not merely search the internet, but also to use forms and interact with webpages. Everyone who runs a website wants visitors, but if you are running an online business you don't just want visitors- you need them.
Having hundreds of robots running through your website is not just useless, but actively unhelpful, as it will make it impossible to tell just how many real humans you get as well as using up all your valuable bandwidth. Although you can put a file on your server to tell robots you do not wish them to access it, it is only the law abiding ones that will obey it, and these are not the problem.
So, what is the one thing that a human can do, but a computer cannot. Ok, setting aside the obvious, it's character recognition. Computers cannot read text in an image. So, what you need, is to include some text in an image and have the user type it in. This is known as a CAPTCHA- a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. This is from the famous Turing Test, where Alan Turing proposed that to be considered intelligent, a computer must be able to communicate indistinguishably from a human through a common medium such as text.
You simply install a small program onto your website, that will generate a small image containing text. The visitor then has to type into a small box what the text is (something like 2h49j usually) to prove that they are not a robot.
This, of course, does not answer the title question... or does it? An essential part of the news is the images that go along with the text, so without the ability to understand a picture, I have to say that no, no computer can really read the news, no matter how easy it is to access newspapers online.
Oleg is an expert on CAPTCHA design. Click to learn more about his ingenious new Smart CAPTCHA technology. You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
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