At 11:54 AM 10/12/00 -0400, James A.. Donald wrote:
-- At 12:59 PM 10/11/2000 -0400, Marcel Popescu wrote:
An interesting idea has surfaced on the freenet-chat list: is it
possible to
build a program that creates some sort of a puzzle, whose answer the generating computer knows (and can verify), but which can only be answered by a human being, not by a computer? [Additional requirement: it should be easy for the human to answer the puzzle.]
Origami world.
Computer generates a random 3D object out of large polygons with fairly sharp angles of contact, subject to various limits on the way in which the object is generated. Displays 2D image of 3D object.
Human infers 3D object from 2D image, infers unseen portions of the image from rules by which the 3D image is generated -- for example that the object must make sense mechanically -- that it should be stable resting on a plane.
You seem to be supposing that human perceptual algorithms (and the illusions they produce) are somehow unknowable or unreplicable by nonanimal machinery. This is meat chauvinism. Look into David Marr's _Vision_ for starters... or Grossburg's (of BU) stuff.. Now back to your regularly scheduled spam laced with cryptography