Artificial intelligence, or AI, has come pretty far in the last few years - much more then anyone really expected it would - and yet somehow, we seem to be just as far from truly intelligent systems as we ever were. No doubt, the great author Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish, especially considering how many of his predictions have come true. However, we still haven't got any positronic brains, or thinking machines such as he suggested.

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.

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.

Particularly with sites such as forums or blogs, a huge volume of robots is a very bad thing. It is easy for a spammer to create a program that will log onto hundreds of forums, and post thousands of annoying messages. This is why it is vital that only humans can use the forms you provide. You can add little tags to your pages to ban robots, but of course, the robots you are worried about are hardly going to pay attention to this. So you need to find some way of preventing anyone who isn't human from accessing your site.

The answer to this is the one thing that a human can do easily, but no robot ever could Optical recognition. Computers cannot read a picture, so if you simply ask the visitor to copy some text from a small picture into a box, then you will immediately block the robots from entering. This is known as CAPTCHA, and is becoming extremely common, precisely because it is so effective.

You simply install a small program onto your website, that will generate a small image containing text. The visitor then has to type into a small box what the text is (something like 2h49j usually) to prove that they are not a robot.

So, can your computer read the news? Well, yes, as long as there isn't a CAPTCHA in the way. Unfortunately, it will be a while yet before any computers can truly be considered intelligent, and even longer before we see any real androids so I suppose I have to conclude with, no, robots really cannot read newspapers.

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

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

Please Rate The Above Article From The Training Category

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive Training Articles Via RSS!