New research shows bots beat people at convincing computers they're not bots
The PC Gamer massive just collectively died of not-surprise. It turns out bots are both faster and more accurate at completing CAPTCHA tests widely used by websites to filter out the machines from human users.
Yup, bots know better than you what a low-res bicycle looks like leaning up against a rusty fence.
The upsides to human verification tests, including the various CAPTCHA implementations (that's Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, if you were wondering), are obvious enough. They prevent the bot hordes from scraping content, posting fake comments and dodgy links, setting up fraudulent accounts and all that bad stuff.
Obviously there's a trade off in terms of the inconvenience of repeatedly pecking away at often confusing images of buses, bicycles, fire hydrants and crosswalks or deciphering and then transcribing squiggly text. But it's worth it to keep our machine overlords at bay.
Of course, it's only worth it if it works. Which, apparently, it doesn't. So says new research conducted by Gene Tsudik and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine.
According to the New Scientist, Tsudik and co. parsed the world's 200 most popular websites, finding 120 of them using CAPTCHA tests. Next, they recruited 1,000 human candidates of varied age, sex, location and education to take 10 CAPTCHA tests each.
Comparing the performance of those humans to that of various bots coded by researchers and published in journals, it was the bots that scored higher.
Humans in the UC Irvine tests were between 50 and 84 percent accurate in the distorted text test, taking between nine and 15 seconds to complete the task. The bots? They were 99.8 percent accurate and did the job in less than a
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