*CAPTCHA = Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to tell Computers Humans Apart.
Applications: a CAPTCHA can help keep (ro)bots from sending spam mail, from getting computer accounts, from entering chat rooms, etc.
2. Can computers out-compute humans? Certainly! Computers can memorize huge data sets and do all sorts of arithmetic quickly and correctly. On these tasks, they leave humans in the dust.
Still, the question arises whether humans having no computational aids, no gadgets, no paper and pencil, can use their very meager computational abilities to authenticate themselves securely... in the face of (possibly computerized) eavesdroppers who observe and record every move they make. This is the goal of the HumanAUT project. **HumanAUT = Human AUThentication.
This talk will describe a working solution for CAPTCHA (see captcha.net) and the current thinking behind HumanAUT.