Search:

Home / Business / Communication / Training


Do Robots Read The News?

By:

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.

Still, although our computers hardly act with intelligence and can certainly not think, there are still thinking elements that occasionally appear. For example, look at the web spider. Obviously not a real spider, I mean the automated little programs that can surf the web almost as well as a human can. Designed to browse the internet and pick out specific key phrases, or pages, they can act fairly intelligently in this particular area.

So while androids may not walk and talk, you could say that they read the news. Web-spiders are becoming ever more prolific as the internet grows, and we find we need some way to easily search it. Unfortunately, not all use the spiders' powerful searching capabilities benignly.

Computer programs can now be taught to not merely search the internet, but also to use forms and interact with webpages. Everyone who runs a website wants visitors, but if you are running an online business you don't just want visitors- you need them.

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 the one thing that a human can do, but a computer cannot. Ok, setting aside the obvious, it's character recognition. Computers cannot read text in an image. So, what you need, is to include some text in an image and have the user type it in. This is known as a CAPTCHA- a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. This is from the famous Turing Test, where Alan Turing proposed that to be considered intelligent, a computer must be able to communicate indistinguishably from a human through a common medium such as text.

All you have to do is install a simple program onto your website, and it will produce a small image with altered text. The visitor has to type that text into a box before they can log in, or otherwise interact with a form. This will block any robots from using it, as the robot will not be able to read the text.

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.

Article Source: http://www.bluearticles.com


Oleg is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his ingenious new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.


Additional Articles From - Home / Business / Communication / Training
Submit Articles
Member Login
Top Authors
Most Popular Articles
Submission Guidelines
Ezine Notifications
Article RSS Feeds
Link to Us
Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service


Free Articles
Cooks Recipes