The ReCaptcha guys need to invent an algorithm that gives an estimate of the likelihood that a human could actually decipher a word, and then only present those above a certain threshold. That’s a different problem to the one of having a machine actually decipher the text, and I reckon it’s probably an easier one. The ReCaptcha above is just plain silly.
1 reply on “ReCaptcha asking a bit much?”
Hi,
I’m the chief engineer on reCAPTCHA. You’re right that this type of issue occurs sometimes. In this case, the blob on the left is part of a book that OCR (understandably!) couldn’t read. If the user just enters “female” they will pass the CAPTCHA (or they can just press refresh to get a new one).
We actually do apply a number of filters to prevent “bad” stuff from being displayed, though these are harder to get right than you might think — think about the cost of false positives.