Do Androids Read Newspapers?

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.

While androids cannot talk, or even walk, you might be able to make a case that they can read the news. Depends what you mean by read really. As spiders become more advanced, they are becoming increasingly useful, and increasingly dangerous. Their powerful search capability, designed for good, can also be used for evil. Or simply to annoy.

Programs can be created that allow not only searching the web, but also interaction with it. Meanwhile, although everyone who has a page wants people to visit it, for those of us who are running businesses online those visitors are truly essential.

Having a horde of robots coming through the site will be of no benefit, and can even hurt, especially if the robots are controlled by spammers. If you run a site such as a blog or a forum, it is especially important that you only allow humans to enter. While you can place tags on your site to deny robots access, and many robots will follow these, it is not these that are the problem. You need some way of blocking access unless the one entering can prove they are human.

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.

Article Source: http://articlesmore.com

Oleg is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to find out more about his revolutionary new Smart CAPTCHA technology.

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