Turing Test
Guru had complained early this week that he was receiving a lot of comment spam on his Movable Type installation. It seems that a lot of these popular blog software are susceptible to it. On Guru’s article, Sathish had suggested a Turing test, which most bots are not capable of solving, but a human could in a flash. This prompted me to create my own Turing test as suggested by Sat and it is up here for testing. Folks, the ball is in your court now…
PS. I don’t intend to add this into my commenting system. Not just yet anyway…
June 20th, 2005 at 12:15 am
Dont add it like numbers - a simple parser would solve that. What you actually need is something like “What is three into one? ” This is extremely difficult for a spam oriented bot. And it is not all that difficult for a human.
June 20th, 2005 at 7:40 am
Sat: What do you suggest? Words for just the input? Do you need the numbers in words? Does the result also need to be in words? The problem is that if the result is also in words, it is likely that people may mistype the result and wind up with an error message.
One more point, Google Calculator gave me the answer “twelve” when I asked “what is three times four?”. Natural language processing scripts already exist and it’s only a matter of time until spambots also employ them.
Further suggestions please…
June 27th, 2005 at 7:28 am
Besides testing my rather weak mathematical skills, what does it do?