> But computers don’t process images the way humans do, Yosinski said.
This means that come the singularity AIs will have to use AI specific CAPTCHAs in order to distinguish between humans (aided by dumb computers) and other AIs.
No, you're the maintenance guy. Computers don't care about formatting. The correct answer is A, because "A" is drawn with just three straight lines and computers like straight lines.
But it arguably takes more data to encode an A - three lines, which means six endpoints, plus whatever signifies the command "draw a straight line." At minimum, that's seven pieces of data.
A C, however, can be drawn as half of a circle - one command to draw an arc, a center point, a radius, and the start and stop angles. Five pieces of data.
(This is assuming, of course, that computers prefer minimal amounts of data. If that's wrong, then the computer would obviously prefer B. You need more data to describe it.)
If we have a singularity AI then we don't need CAPTCHAs: For all intents and purposes an AI is equal or superior to humans, there is no distinction to be made. The Turing Test is a form of CAPTCHA.
Also, one could make CAPTCHA's incredibly hard. Humans and dumb computers won't be able to solve it, and singular AI's get a pass. So give access to anyone who isn't able to solve the CAPTCHA and redirect the singularity AIs to google.com :).
Finally, the singular AI could create a CAPTCHA which separates humans from AI. The problem of separating humans from AI will quickly become too difficult for humans to solve.
That's actually a fun-sounding research project: train humans to classify those images. I'd be very interested to know if humans could learn to classify either sets of images. They might not look like a 'panda' to us, but there is some underlying pattern that a machine can pick out and apply the arbitrary label 'panda' to. Can a human learn that same pattern?
Maybe so. But I was thinking, maybe there're weird patterns that human pattern-matching will erroneously classify as well. Probably unconsciously - if we look again, we'd say 'huh, that's just a mess of pixels'. So you'd have to flash them briefly and ask for an instant answer or something, to catch the pattern matcher before the cognitive check got done?
This means that come the singularity AIs will have to use AI specific CAPTCHAs in order to distinguish between humans (aided by dumb computers) and other AIs.