Do Robots Read The News?
Artificial intelligence, or AI, has come pretty far in the last few years - much more then anyone really expected it would - and yet somehow, we seem to be just as far from truly intelligent systems as we ever were. No doubt, the great author Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish, especially considering how many of his predictions have come true. However, we still haven't got any positronic brains, or thinking machines such as he suggested.
Still, although our computers hardly act with intelligence and can certainly not think, there are still thinking elements that occasionally appear. For example, look at the web spider. Obviously not a real spider, I mean the automated little programs that can surf the web almost as well as a human can. Designed to browse the internet and pick out specific key phrases, or pages, they can act fairly intelligently in this particular area.
So while androids may not walk and talk, you could say that they read the news. Web-spiders are becoming ever more prolific as the internet grows, and we find we need some way to easily search it. Unfortunately, not all use the spiders' powerful searching capabilities benignly.
Programs can be created that allow not only searching the web, but also interaction with it. Meanwhile, although everyone who has a page wants people to visit it, for those of us who are running businesses online those visitors are truly essential.
Particularly with sites such as forums or blogs, a huge volume of robots is a very bad thing. It is easy for a spammer to create a program that will log onto hundreds of forums, and post thousands of annoying messages. This is why it is vital that only humans can use the forms you provide. You can add little tags to your pages to ban robots, but of course, the robots you are worried about are hardly going to pay attention to this. So you need to find some way of preventing anyone who isn't human from accessing your site.
The answer to this is the one thing that a human can do easily, but no robot ever could Optical recognition. Computers cannot read a picture, so if you simply ask the visitor to copy some text from a small picture into a box, then you will immediately block the robots from entering. This is known as CAPTCHA, and is becoming extremely common, precisely because it is so effective.
All you have to do is install a simple program onto your website, and it will produce a small image with altered text. The visitor has to type that text into a box before they can log in, or otherwise interact with a form. This will block any robots from using it, as the robot will not be able to read the text.
In answer to the title, can a computer read the news? Yes, they can, as long as there is no CATCHA blocking their path. On the other hand, it will be quite a while yet before any computer can understand the news, as they are pretty far from being intelligent.
The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his revolutionary new Smart CAPTCHA technology.
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