In 1950, Alan Turing wrote a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”a He proposed a test in which a human attempts to distinguish between a human and a computer by exchanging text messages with each of them. If the human is unable to distinguish between the two, the computer is said to have passed the “Turing Test.”…
Much has been written about the increasingly sophisticated ability of computer programs to pass the CAPTCHA tests or a variation in which the program sends the image to a human on the Internet who is given some benefit or payment for solving the problem, which is then relayed by the imitating program to the computer program running the CAPTCHA test. This is not merely an amusing game. As computer programs have grown capable of more sophisticated behavior, they are being used to emulate humans to fool less-sophisticated programs into treating computer-generated actions as if they originate from a human. This is an important practical problem because failure to make this distinction may mean malicious programs can register millions of fake identities on an email system for purposes of sending phishingc email messages or making comments on social media Web pages.
Read more at Communications of the ACM
