Fun Mashup: HotCaptcha

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What is a Captcha?

Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Alan Turing (1950) is one of the Artificial Intelligence researchers who proposed a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. CAPTCHA’s are basically a challenge test to tell between a robot and a human. They are typically manifested by an image with distorted characters that a human must enter and submit correctly in order to proceed.

For this blog, for example, I use a mathematics CAPTCHA that is simple for humans to compute, but fools robots. CAPTCHA’s for blogs typically are used to prevent comment spam from robots. I implemented a simple mathematics CAPTCHA after being attacked by a ton of comment spam a few weeks ago.

CAPTCHA’S are based on an algorithm, typically made public; some are covered by a patent whereas others are licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL). The Alogorithm’s often have a public interface for developers to call in order to use the CAPTCHA.

This morning, I found this funny mashup this morning called HotCaptcha.com on Tim Oreilly’s blog.  When I found it, I laughed really hard — but beware: there might be some innaproprtiate pictures; I didn’t see any, but there might be, so just watch out.

HotCaptcha is based on the HOTorNOT API. That API was built from the collective intelligence (as of this posting, there have been 12 billion votes) of the HOTorNOT user community who vote on who is Hot or Not.

HOTorNOT is a simple voting mechanism where a male or female picture is rendered to a human and the human votes on whether the person’s picture is HOT or NOT. That voting data is made available via a public API and that is how HotCaptcha made their Captcha.

HotCaptcha and Subjectivity

The female one was kinda easy for me to do because the Hot pictures were of women who were not overweight — I’m not making a moral judgment here, but it is a weak pattern that I’ve discovered — an imperfect one. I then tried the male pictures and I failed miserably. I didn’t find an overall pattern on Hot’ness, but that’s by design.

Subjectivity is a hallmark of being human and subjectivity makes it very, very difficult for a robot to replicate. Machines attempt to find patterns, but HotCaptcha is completely subjective, which makes it difficult for a robot to find patterns in. Moreover, because HotCaptcha uses images, that makes it doubly difficult for robots to understand since the state of digital object detection is still pretty immature. Because of these characteristics, CAPTCHA’s are effective in curbing robots from acting human-like.

Criticism of HotCaptcha

Unlike most CAPTCHA mechanisms, HotCaptcha relies on the collective wisdom of the user base — in this case 12 billion votes. Those votes, however, are captured in space and time. This means that a ‘Hot’ vote for a picture, may not be so hot several years from now. In other words, the ‘wisdom of crowds‘ is really not wise sometimes and is often a reflection of the values of the society at the current state. If HotCaptcha were used, say, many years from now, the pictures with votes from 10 years previous may not be so hot anymore and the ‘or not’ pictures might be.

Traditional CAPTCHA’s are still the best route to go. Characteristics that make it difficult for a robot to mimick a human, such as distorted images and other methods easy-for-a-human but difficult-for-a-robot to copy are still the best way to go. But, they must be timeless and not subject to what is cool at the moment. This way, CAPTCHA’s can preserve the qualities that make it value-adding to businesses and enterprises.

Still . . .

An even more interesting CAPTCHA is one where a series of ethnic people are rendered and the user is asked to pick who the 3 asians are from a set of caucasians, etc.  That would be funny.

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