Artificial intelligence has become much more advanced in recent years then anyone imagined it would, and yet we remain, seemingly, as far from the real of the truly intelligent android as ever. Undoubtedly Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish; much of it according to his predictions, yet there are still no conscious machines or positronic brains. 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. So, can your computer read the news? Well, yes, as long as there isn't a CAPTCHA in the way. Unfortunately, it will be a while yet before any computers can truly be considered intelligent, and even longer before we see any real androids so I suppose I have to conclude with, no, robots really cannot read newspapers.
The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to find out more about his new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.
Title: Can Androids Read The News? Article Distribution and Free Web Content by www.reprint-content.com
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