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Can Androids Read The News?

Research into AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence, has proceed at an incredible pace in the last century or so. However, we are still nearly as far as we ever were from creating the first truly functional android. I have no doubt that, had he lived to today, Isaac Asimov would be astonished although perhaps not surprised at the speed with which his stories have become reality. Unfortunately, tales of thinking machines and positronic brains remain nothing more then tales.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of intelligence with which our computers usually act, they do occasionally show human-like insights and actions. To give you one example, look at how robots can be created to browse the internet. Not physical robots, of course, but small programs that can go online and surf the web. Used most commonly be search engines, these little scripts can read pages almost as well as a human can.

Although our computers remain unable to communicate through speech, and are physically very different from us, you could well argue that they are still able to read the news. As the internet grows, web spiders and surfing robots become ever more common, especially as the amount of data available make it more important then ever that we find some way to manage it and find what we are looking for.

Programs and scripts can be taught not only to search the web, but also to interact with it. Everyone who has a webpage wants people to visit, but for those running an online business it is not just that they want people, but that they need people.

Having hundreds of robots running through your website is not just useless, but actively unhelpful, as it will make it impossible to tell just how many real humans you get as well as using up all your valuable bandwidth. Although you can put a file on your server to tell robots you do not wish them to access it, it is only the law abiding ones that will obey it, and these are not the problem.

So what is it that separates the man from the machine? Something that any human will be able to do, but no robot could? The answer, of course, is character recognition. Humans are easily able to read text, and can even do so if it has been altered- stretched slightly, if it changes colour, or even has a small line through it. Robots can't do this. This is known as a CAPTCHA, a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

All you have to do is install a basic script onto your website, which will generate the image, and block any robots from gaining access. It's hardly difficult to do, and well worth the effort for the trouble it will save weeding out annoying comments from your forum.

In answer to the title, can a computer read the news? Yes, they can, as long as there is no CATCHA blocking their path. On the other hand, it will be quite a while yet before any computer can understand the news, as they are pretty far from being intelligent.

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The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design. Click to find out more about his revolutionary new Smart CAPTCHA technology.

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