I Hope This CAPTCHAs Your Attention
Don't worry, I personally will never make you prove you're not a robot.
Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Today, I want you to tell me which one of these boxes contains a traffic light.
The CAPTCHA test to prove you’re not a bot stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
The comedian John Mulaney has a terrific bit that I often think about. The general gist is that the world is run by robots, and we have to show that we’re not a robot so that we can log in and see our own stuff.
Mulaney becomes a mystical goblin-esque creature as he unveils the robot test. Is this curvy letter a 3 or an E?
The bit concludes that we spend the majority of our time telling robots that we ourselves are not robots. “Think about that for two minutes and tell me you don’t want to walk into the ocean.”
(Sorry, that ocean line is not in the above video. But an ocean liner might be in this floating zip code.)
Anyway, nary a day goes by that we don’t have to fill out some kind of test when logging into a website with potentially sensitive data.
Sometimes it’s as simple as checking a box that says “Not me, I couldn’t possibly be a robot!” Other times, you’ll have to look at images that were taken in 1934 using a cardboard camera and figure out if that blob you see off in the distance is, in fact, a bicycle. On some occasions, you’re given a series of letters or numbers, but they’re all twisted up! How could a robot possibly read that?
The first CAPTCHA (known as reCAPTCHA v1) debuted in 1997. That’s the kind that uses the squiggly and/or wavy and/or distorted letters. However, these tests weren’t officially coined as CAPTCHAs until 2003.
Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford, a collection of computer scientists and software engineers, came up with the name. I’m assuming their discussions were like brainstorms I’ve had, where someone might throw out an idea we all know is bad (I am usually the one throwing out said idea), but everyone has to pretend it’s okay.
“No, no, you’re not stupid! ‘You are about to take the official examination to show you’re not one of them robots’ is a perfectly fine name for this.”
The quartet eventually settled on the name Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Does that technically spell out CAPTTTTCHA? You betcha! But sometimes we need to be loose with our acronyms.
On average, humans can solve a CAPTCHA in about 10 seconds. Of course, filling out several in a day can equal hours of wasted time every year.
In an ironic twist, the “official CAPTCHA site” is telling me it’s not a secure website. Maybe the robots have won, after all.