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Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by allochthon on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @07:29PM (#7601154)
"Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed.

My sense is that IBM's Watson could tackle this particular question. Also interesting to note that the question introduces external considerations, such as whether or not there's someone dangerous near the house, bed, park, etc. A human respondent will have to ignore the matter of whether there's additional context and second-guess the captcha author to get the problem right -- presumably the most unsafe environment is the volcano.

Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by tim333 on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @09:35PM (#7601576)
Of course the simple way around

"Pick the most unsafe environment", followed by pictures of a house, a park, a volcano, a bed.

if you're a spammer is to choose randomly and make four times as many attempts. Which is why catchpas make you type six or more letters giving millions of combinations so you can't do it randomly. To get up to a similar resistance to random attempts with 'pick the unsafe environment' type questions you'd need of the order or eight of them (giving 4^8 or approx 65k combinations). Would you as a user want to fill in 8 of those things?

Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by im3w1l on Thursday April 17, 2014 @05:11PM (#7606393)
The key is that you are only presented with one captcha per request. But if you fail too many, you get labelled a spammer.
Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by slacka on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @11:53PM (#7601937)
Like Deep Blue, Watson represented a major advance in the state of weak AI. However at its core, it's still just a text-based statistical search engine. It has no ability to "learn" new abilities. Its algorithms will use previous answers to adjust ranking of answers, but once a category is finished, that data is lost. For new data, its database needs to be re-indexed. For new behavior like recognizing pictures or playing a game, it needs to be programmed.

Watson played a simplified version of Jeopardy with no video or audio questions. This was a key compromise to allow a text based system to compete with humans. The AI problem of recognizing pictures is practically unsolved. It took Google's best researchers, a massive database of cat pictures, and a supercomputer just to train a computer to recognize when a cat was in a photo. So your sense of Watson's present abilities is a little skewed and unrealistic.

Re:Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA w... by willvarfar on Thursday April 17, 2014 @02:27AM (#7602240)
Yes its interesting; you can easily imagine that the following trends are detected:

* "home and safe" "safe as houses" etc

* "safe in bed" "safely tucked up in bed" etc

* "volcano" ... no clear data. Certainly dangerous being a volcanologist, but that'd be great AI googlefu

* "pensioner attacked in park" .. "our parks are not safe" etc... Hmm, Parks are the most dangerous.

Because frequency of local newspaper reports is a bad measure for volcanos I guess.