Present an agent with a CAPTCHA consisting of a 3D generated scene. In this scene, something is weird. The easiest way to accomplish this is to fill the scene with many objects. One of those objects is composed of correct parts, but the parts are interconnected in a weird way. For example a cat might have it's tail sticking out of it's head. Or a table might have a 5th leg.

If the agent clicked on the region containing the mistake, they would pass as a human. If the agent clicked on some other portion of the scene, they would be considered a robot.

This would have several benefits:

- No more typing

- It's more enjoyable spotting things that are wrong, than trying to pass a test imposed on you by some stupid web site who thinks it's better than you just because it can scramble some letters.

- Would be quicker to pass through. Humans are wired to spot weird stuff quickly.

- Is cross cultural

For better accuracy several of these could be chained together. You would need to pass 3 in a row to prove you are a human. After all a robot could click randomly at the first image and it would be right 1% of the time assuming the image is consists of 100 areas. Passing all three by luck would be possible only 1 in 1,000,000 tries.
-- ixnaum, Apr 18 2016

Highlights for Children - What's Wrong https://www.highlig...ids.com/whats-wrong
A few too many things, perhaps [smendler, Apr 20 2016]

// a cat might have it's tail sticking out of it's head. //

They sometimes look a bit like that after we've been working on them for a while. More usually, the identifiable parts are fairly widely separated.
-- 8th of 7, Apr 18 2016


Clever idea. You'd need to generate a lot of these little puzzles, otherwise a human could just program the answers for images that the computer would be able to recognize by color properties, size, etc.
-- the porpoise, Apr 18 2016


//You'd need to generate a lot of these little puzzles

They can be computer generated. You can have infinite number of them. All the computer has to do is have 3D models that are made out of components. The computer will pick one of the models and algorithmically move the component to the wrong place. For example, the cat would be a 3D model made out of 4 legs, head, body and tail. Computer would roll the dice and randomly move a body part and connect it to the wrong place.
-- ixnaum, Apr 18 2016


Unfortunately you've hit on the bit of human reasoning (object recognition) that is almost solved this very moment.
-- Voice, Apr 19 2016


Object recognition is not sufficient for this task. A bot would have to recognize the object AND figure out what's wrong with it.

If you show a bot cat body parts it will probably be able to correctly categorize them as a "cat". What it won't be able to do is figure out whether the body parts are connected together the right way.

Also, it won't be just cats.
-- ixnaum, Apr 19 2016


I wonder how people with keyboards in other alphabets do those captchas. I assume there are keyboards with other alphabets.
-- bungston, Apr 19 2016


How about the capcha being a link to a random idea on the Halfbakery? The reader will then have to click on the first word of the idea which makes it clearly unfeasible.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 19 2016


No, I'd inadvertently used a which for that which that should have been a that. So, that which that was which should have been that. But point taken.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 19 2016


Actually, a better plan would be to simply enforce the death penalty on people who write or use the bot-software that has made the use of capchas necessary.

If every human being has to go through an average of 1 capcha per week, and if it takes 5 seconds to do so, that amounts to 57,712 man-years of time wasted, per year. That is roughly equivalent to 700 human lives. So the death penalty seems entirely reasonable.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 19 2016


//A bot would have to recognize the object AND figure out what's wrong with it. //

Not as described.

//If the agent clicked on the region containing the mistake, they would pass as a human//
-- Voice, Apr 19 2016


Same thing. What I'm saying is that picking out a mistake involves 2 steps. Recognition and figuring out what's wrong
-- ixnaum, Apr 19 2016


G 2 EN IOU 0S.
-- blissmiss, Apr 19 2016


// What I'm saying is that picking out a mistake involves 2 steps. Recognition and figuring out what's wrong //

So, just like the Primaries and the succeeding election ?
-- 8th of 7, Apr 19 2016


//If everybody could just trust each other implicitly and totally, there’d be no requirement for all this nonsense// That was precisely the point I thought I was making.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 19 2016


[+]Clever. But the generating algorithm might have difficulty making things really "wrong".

For instance, if they swapped the cat's left-hind-leg with the cat's right-hind-leg, that'd be far too subtle for a human to see it as "wrong" in a scene with 20 objects.

It would be rather frustrating to be told, "Sorry, you're a robot" because some robot made swaps that it thought were different, but really were equivalent.
-- sophocles, Apr 19 2016


Exactly. If a computer can generate the images then another computer should be able to decode them. The trivial case would be stealing or reverse engineering the code.
-- the porpoise, Apr 20 2016


Next up, the "Where's Wally ?" Captcha...
-- 8th of 7, Apr 20 2016


//should be able to decode //

Are you sure about that?

{shakes head wisely, muttering something about entropy}
-- pertinax, Apr 24 2016



random, halfbakery