CDR: Think cash

[Marcel Popescu]

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.]

My proposal was to randomly create an image, which should be 1) easily
recognizable by a human (say the image of a pet), but 2) complex enough so
that no known algorithm could "reverse-engineer" this. [You need a
randomly-generated image because otherwise one could build a large database
of all the possible images and the correct answers.] Background information
would also be very useful - see
http://www.digitalblasphemy.com/userg/images/969403123.shtml - it's easy for
a human being to identify the animal in the picture, but (AFAIK) impossible
to write a program to do the same thing.

Ideas?

Mark

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