Turning+Test+and+CAPTCHA

= Strand 3: IT Systems =

Turning Test and CAPTCHA:
The Turning Test is a simple test for testing a computer’s intelligence. The test was named after Alan Turning who was the man who made the digital computer. The Turning Test works like this: There is a judge who is in a chat session chatting simultaneously with two different people, the catch, though, is that one person is a human and the other is a computer. If the computer can fool the judge so that he cannot tell the difference between the computer and the human, then the computer has passed the Turning Test. The problem with the test is that when asking questions to a computer, you can tell if it is a computer as it will never make spelling mistakes and might give answers in a factual way. Which in the Turing Test means that it is not intelligence, so programmers will make the computer make spelling mistakes and have other qualities to make it look more human, which bring up the question, is it really intelligent?. So this is the main problem with the Turning Test. However the test was not designed to be the one and only way to test a computer’s intelligence. In fact many scientists in artificial intelligence don’t use it and is impractical for a way to measure intelligence. It would be almost taking a step backwards if AI was designed just to pass the Turning Test. Even though many don’t think of the test as a deciding factor there is still a prize for the computer that can best fool the judge.

My own personal thoughts on this is that the test will become an important deciding factor when a computer can pretend to be a human by its self and not through the makers programming it to make it act like a human.

CAPTCHA stands for ‘**C**ompletely **A**utomated **P**ublic **T**urning test to tell **C**omputers and **H**umans **A**part’ CAPTCHA is basically a reverse of the Turning Test. By looking at what it stands for it is simply a way for telling a computer apart from a human. If you have used the internet before you have probably used this test without knowing its name. When you have to insert some text on to the internet for example a survey, so that computers don’t go around automatically filling it a person has to enter text to prove that he is a human. But computers can easily recognize normal regular fonts and input the text in fooling the test. So what they do is either distorts the text so it no longer uniform or add a background so the text doesn’t look like text to the computer or even a combination of both. This way of breaking up uniform text is easy for humans to read and recognize but very hard and even impossible for computers.