CDR: RE: Think cash

[Trei, Peter]

> ----------
> Marcel Popescu[SMTP:mdpopescu at geocities.com] 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.]
> 
> 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
> 
That's a really interesting question. My off-the-cuff answer 
would be 'no'. The constraints which say that the problem is 
randomly generated by a computer and the answer also evaluated 
by a computer are the killers. Any problem which one computer 
can create, and solve, can also be solved by another.

Perhaps one could generate the solution, and find a problem 
which is solved by that solution, but finding a type of 
problem which humans will always solve one way, and
computers another is the rub.

You refer the the problem of recognizing a photo of an animal. 
It used to be said that no computer program could reliably 
distinguish between a dog and a cat, but I'm not sure that's 
the case since the development of neural networks.

Almost any question which has a solution which is clear, 
unambiguous, and easy determined by a human can probably 
also be solved by either a regular program or a neural net.

What you are really attempting to find is a reliable, fast, 
single-question Turing test. I'm far from sure this is 
possible.

Peter Trei