CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA (a backronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.

The term was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford. The most common type of CAPTCHA was first invented in 1997 by two groups working in parallel: (1) Mark D. Lillibridge, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Z. Broder; and (2) Reshef, Raanan and Solan. This form of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. Because the test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human, a CAPTCHA is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test.

This user identification procedure has received many criticisms, especially from disabled people, but also from other people who feel that their everyday work is slowed down by distorted words that are difficult to read. It takes the average person approximately 10 seconds to solve a typical CAPTCHA.

Since the early days of the Internet, users have wanted to make text illegible to computers. The first such people could be hackers, posting about sensitive topics to online forums they thought were being automatically monitored for keywords. To circumvent such filters, they would replace a word with look-alike characters. HELLO could become |-|3|_|_() or )-(3££0, as well as numerous other variants, such that a filter could not possibly detect all of them. This later became known as leetspeak.

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