Think cash
Adam Back
adam@cypherspace.org
Fri, 9 Mar 2001 04:28:47 -0400
A friend of mine had a go at building such a puzzle to
deter automated downloads of activation codes. He built a
prototype.
It was just a pattern matching problem. It would take a
set of numbers draw them in a pixel array and munge it
around a bit, scatter random pixels over it. Humans can
easily read off the number. It would take a bit of effort
to build OCR software that can read through that noise.
But I'm pretty sure it could be done if somone were
motivated.
You see a similar thing where people render their email
addresses as a GIF to hide it from spiders.
Adam
On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 02:17:47AM -0600, Tony Kimball wrote:
>
> It seems not so hard to me.
>
> For example, abstractly, the computer can make a picture, and ask a
> question about it which requires significant understanding,
> and parse the reply trivially.