Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems

An anonymous reader writes "With bots getting closer to beating text-based CAPTCHAs for good, New Scientist points out that when they do, OCR technology will at least have advanced. The article goes on to suggest that whatever kind of reverse Turing Test that comes next should be chosen to motivate spammers to solve other pressing AI problems, such as image recognition. Are there any other problems that criminal crowdsourcing could help with?"

Busting captchas has not advanced anything...

[Jane Q. Public]

it has simply used existing OCR-type technology on a slightly (and I want to emphasize "slightly") different problem. Different character sets, if you will.

Re:But will they share their code?

[ceejayoz]

Spammers sell their code to other spammers all the time.

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[Ilyakub]

Facial recognition is not only pretty good, but is available in consumer applications. Google's Picasa does it quite well for your personal photos, and Face.com can go through your Facebook photos and quite accurately suggest tags.

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[bmgoau]

Picasa is a popular image management program that has supported facial recognition since last year: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/02/picasa-refresh-brings-facial-recognition/ [techcrunch.com]

I havnt used it, so im not sure how good it is.

Re:a possible idea

[dcollins]

Certainly not a full-on AI problem, just parameterize the flow density and flow rate and define a decent model and cost function, and run it through an NLP solver.

Except that it's really a discrete problem, with a solution that likely has sensitive dependence on initial conditions (i.e., chaotic), and would result in symptoms such as "bus bunching": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching [wikipedia.org]

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[dangitman]

Micro payments are terrible ideas, first because it violates basic net neutrality principles...

Methinks you have no idea what "net neutrality" actually means. What does paying to post on a forum have to do with net neutrality?

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[Ardrad]

The new iPhoto '09 does a good job finding faces in clear pictures, and if you tell it where to look in fuzzy photos it learns and can find the face well there too. I have to agree facial recognition is making big steps forward. And no, it's not because I love my Apple that I mention this, it's because that's the latest facial recognition software I've used.

Re:a possible idea

[dcollins]

Hmmm, if you smoothed out the data so that it was say, averaged over an hour, and force it to be continuous, could you get something going then.

My point is that's about the worst assumption you can make.

Re:Busting captchas has not advanced anything...

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

I would agree, if general-purpose captcha-beating software were available. But that isn't so. Each captcha system was beaten by custom code, individually written for that system. So in effect, it is not much different than adding a new font to existing OCR software.

Most of them don't actually beat the captcha with a program. This [getafreelancer.com] is how it gets done.

Re:Recaptcha

[sulliwan]

You only have to get the word that OCR can recognize right. Just try guessing which of the two words OCR can't recognize and type some random gibberish instead of that word, it will let you through.

Re:How About Using Stereograms?

[hankwang]

How hard would it be for a computer program to derive 3D information from a stereogram and make sense out of it?

Converting the stereogram into a depth map: not very hard I think; at least, easier than for most humans. You look for repeating patterns along horizontal lines. Depending on whether the pattern repeats itself squeezed or stretched, it corresponds to negative or positive depth changes. The next problem is interpreting the depth map as an image to answer the captcha challenge (Q: what do you see here? A: shark), but it would be much more user-friendly to present the depth map directly to the user. I once read about the idea generate pictures from 3-dimensional models with arbitrary angles of view ("mother with child viewed from above"). The brain is much better at recognizing such pictures than computer vision software. A problem is that the web server needs to judge whether the answer given by the visitor is correct with a close-to-zero chance of guessing correct.

Re:Ignoring the real problem.

[James Youngman]

And the answer is incoming links from around 86,000 pages according to google (links:domain.name)a lot of them are created internally passing links between malware site to malware site. But the majority come from sites using php forms which add user posts to the the sites pages. A number of months ago i found my sites contact forms were sending a lot of garbage emails to me absolutely stuffed with urls and I wondered why bother doing this since i'm not going to visit the sites. anyway the cure was to only allow the forms to be processed with no more than a few urls in them. stopped the junk hitting the inbox. It's not stopped the automated posting but the forms are not processed and i don't get them any more. When I examined the links to the malware site i found php posted user posts packed with links just like my emails had been the difference being these were posted published and being crawled. Because of these links a site with less than 4 weeks life is ranked highly because of the quantity of inbound links and thats why I got to watch a display of XP like virus and malware scanning,

The general solution to this problem is for you to modify your software so that links in blog comments are served to add rel="nofollow" to all of the links. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow [wikipedia.org] for more details. Of course that will not make the spam comment posts go away immediately but if the technique is rolled out widely, then the SEOs will figure out that posting spam blog comments does not gain them anything.

Re:It was supposed to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this exists: http://spamornot.org/ [spamornot.org]