CAPTCHA
To day i can add a new acronym to my vocabulary: CAPTCHA which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. A trademark coined in Carnegie Mellon University. You can read about it here and in wikipedia. You used this tecnology when you were asked to type a word shown in a graphic when you wanted to register for some free service o vote in a pool.
They have a nice article published in Comunications of the ACM
Some quotes:
...CAPTCHAs are similar to the Turing Test in that they distinguish humans from computers, but they differ in that the judge is now a computer...
In the case of ordinary cryptography, it is assumed (for example) that the adversary cannot factor 1024-bit integers in any reasonable amount of time. In our case, we assume the adversary cannot solve an artificial intelligence problem with higher accuracy than what s currently known to the AI community [1, 2, 5, 6, 8]. This approach has the beneficial side effect of inducing security researchers, as well as otherwise malicious programmers, to advance the field of AI (much like computational number theory has been advanced since the advent of modern cryptography). This is how lazy cryptographers do AI.There are several types of CAPTCHAS. For example ESP-PIX shows you 4 pictures with some distortion and you have to choose a word that is related with them. You can try it here.
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