Computer Milk » Artificial Intelligence http://www.computermilk.net Straight from the teats of technology Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:16:55 +0000 en hourly 1 Emotional Humanoid Robots http://www.computermilk.net/2009/06/27/emotional-humanoid-robots/ http://www.computermilk.net/2009/06/27/emotional-humanoid-robots/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:43:20 +0000 obadiah http://www.computermilk.net/?p=136 Interacting with robots in the future could be easier due to their ability to simulate human emotions. Think C3P0 from Star Wars.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZJMzd9ek9A

By moving lips, eyelids, eyebrows, and other bodily joints, a robot named Kobian that was recently unveiled in Japan is able to express its emotions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FBUt336wBI

However, if you’ve ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you know about Marvin the paranoid android. Maybe there is a downside to emotional robots. After all, who wants to deal with a depressed robot?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sZD7ZnWvc

]]> http://www.computermilk.net/2009/06/27/emotional-humanoid-robots/feed/ 1 CAPTCHA the moment http://www.computermilk.net/2009/04/19/captcha-the-moment/ http://www.computermilk.net/2009/04/19/captcha-the-moment/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:14:03 +0000 obadiah http://www.computermilk.net/?p=63 Let’s face it, opening your in-box to a hundred unwanted e-mail messages (spam) can ruin your entire day. So, how do you prevent it? Well, you really can’t. But if you have a website with a contact form, you can drastically reduce your spam with the use of a CAPTCHA.

Text based CAPTCHAs are no longer able to fool the bots. How long will it be before they can handle image based CAPTCHA’s as well? And is reducing your spam worth alienating a percentage of your users? The harder it is for a computer to solve, the more inconvenient it becomes for legitimate users. This results in less users. Many have pointed out that using CAPTCHAs to stop spam bots is doomed to fail and that we should use a different approach. Simple questions are often used effectively. Perhaps flash or javascript can help. But are these really solutions or only temporary measures to prolong the inevitable?

It’s like an arms race between spammers and spam blockers. Spammers aren’t just using bots anymore either. The new trend is to buy or outsource a cheap labor force to break CAPTCHAs. These data workers often earn much more solving CAPTCHAs than doing legitimate work.

example of a captcha

The future of this arms race between spammers and spam blockers looks bleak. However, some see a silver lining to the spam problem in that we can harness the spammers to solve important AI (Artificial Intelligence) problems by using specific types of CAPTCHAs. Some of these problems include OCR (Optical Character Regognition), Voice Recognition, etc.

That would be great for AI, but does that mean your inbox will never be free of Wholesale Watches, fake Bank Account updates, Discount Pharmacy, Multiple Orgasms, and Online Diplomas? I hope not.

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