Linearized computations - was OCR

[Declan McCullagh]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 01:28:20PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
> I think text is the wrong approach. Put up some pictures,
> and a question - 'Click on the white bunny' 'Click on the
> chipmunk' 'Click on the Russian icon'. 'Click on the clowns nose'
> 'Click on the clown's right hand'
> 
> Taking text, which is explicitly designed to be readable, and
> trying to find a degree of distortion which is human (but not machine)
> readable is probably a bad approach. Try something a 6 year old
> can do, but which is still a PhD thesis problem for computers.

I had thoughts along a similar line as Peter's, except to use numbers.
Include with <img> tags some .GIFs and ask the person/bot to type in
the numbers in the GIFs. Generate the filenames randomly and expire
them after five minutes. Should take you 10 minutes to write a
prototype CGI script in Perl.

-Declan