The Anti-Turing Test
from the captchas dept
A few months ago someone sent me the following which I found to be very cool: "... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang." I wish I had a real source for it, but all I get on a Google search is other sites posting the same quote. Anyway, I was just reminded of that when reading this NY Times article about the idea of "Captchas", which are tricks to make sure someone filling out a web-form or registration page is really a human, and not a bot. In other words, it's a sort of anti-Turing test. I would think that a system using plenty of misspelled words like the above paragraph could easily fool a computer, but is understandable by humans, and could make a good captcha.
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Randomize vs. swap?
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Re: Randomize vs. swap?
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Re: Randomize vs. swap?
That said, I can say I had no trouble whatsover reading the mixed up paragraph. At least in my case, dyslexia has no effect on my ability to do such things.
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Re: Randomize vs. swap?
or more precisely http://66.41.60.21/research-reading-orthography.html
english has so many spelling variations for individual phonemes, it makes sense we can understand this story. i wonder if readers of languages with fewer spelling variations can do this trick.
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This was easy to read...
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I fail to see
If my robot is matching "Address" now, how hard would it be to change that to match /A[dres]{5,5}s/?
Not very.
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Re: I fail to see
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Re: I fail to see
Of course, whether this helps to spot the difference between a computer and a person, like the captchas, depends on how you use it. If it's simply a matter of repeating the muddled word in English, then it's easy. If it's interpreting a sentence like "It's Friday today, and this weekend I'm having a party. Would you expect me to be happy?", or "What colour is grass?" or "My foot itches. Should I scratch it, slap it, or paint it blue?", then it's a problem. Of course, that would be a problem anyway.
What was my point again?
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Not a suprise
A computer can easily compensate for this by using a dictionary and N-gram statistics to correct text.
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Re: Not a suprise
A related scenario comes up when letters, instead of being transposed, are substituted for the wrong letters or symbols. This tends to happen when Americans in France, using a French keyboard, write to me in English. Because the locations of the keys are transposed (QWERTY is not used there), I end up getting things like: "Deqr Noq,; It zqs reqlly greqt tqlking to you..." (This is a mild example.) If found this type of substitution very easy to pick up in real time, partly on the basis of context and partly because many key word-initial or word-final letters were not changed.
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
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what a crock
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Quote source
"You report that reversing 50-millisecond segments of recorded sound does not greatly affect listeners' ability to understand speech (In Brief, 1 May, p27).
This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters ..." etc.
Hope this helps.
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Turing Test Two
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