CAPTCHAs cracking surprise: The Vicarious Program 'The HERO'

Vicarious, a San Francisco-based company is currently working on teaching software to develop a sense of vision. Ultimately, the vision system should be able to recognize letters wherever they appear, identify objects in photographs, and generally do all the stuff any kid with healthy vision do. Breaking CAPTCHAs, those distorted letter patterns that websites often use to weed out human users from spambots. The company currently says, their software solves CAPTCHAs on average, 90% of the time. 

"CAPTCHA is a good test because it is a representative of many of the problems you see in general perception. For example, variation- the amount of variation in the letter. The difficult of recognizing the letters from clutter and overlap. These are all problems that you have to solve in general vision also", says Dileep George, one of the Vicarious founders. 

The software uses machine learning, a technique pioneered in 1980s. During that time programmers teach their program concepts such as the shape of the letter A by feeding the program thousands of examples of A. Usually its hard for the computer to identify particular shape of the letters etc. But George and his colleagues say they have advanced the field by building a program that learns by example, but instead of requiring thousands of examples, may be just 10 per letter. That makes the program a more human-like learner, says Scott Phoenix, George's co-founder. 

Appreciation even started coming all over the world. "I think what they have done is pretty impressive", says Chris Eliasmith, a researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada who works on a brain model named Spaun. He also says, "I believe they have made progress in basic machine learning kind of  problems, problems that have been sort of staples of the field for a while". 

If their work is going to be a success, we  can see a major break through in the field of artificial intelligence where these sort of programs can be used in an expert level. But still there is a lot to go ahead by the Vicarious's team, hoping for the best. But at the same time, one question rises, what if the same program gets into the wrong hands, for example, what happens if the spambot becomes a learner of this program? :D :) 

Note: CAPTCHA - Complete Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart