San Francisco-based startup Vicarious claims that it has developed an algorithm that can crack CAPTCHAs without requiring any human intervention at all.
Researchers have been behind CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) for a long time now and many have claimed to break the system, but all of them have failed miserably. CAPTCHAs are the most commonly used mechanism to prevent bots from filling out forms, registering users and performing other such similar activities.
The company claims that the new algorithm is quite different from previous one and that is a lot smarter than currently available OCR solutions. Vicarious claims that the algorithm has a success rate between 90 and 97 percent. Vicarious claims that it has been able to crack the CAPTCHAs deployed on sites like Google and PayPal.
However, the developers haven’t made the technology public without a third party review, it will be impossible to say for sure that the technology works as advertised. The company has claimed that the algorithm has been developed at a much lower cost than algorithms that “mimic the perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human brain”, notes Reuters.
Vicarious board member Dustin Moskovitz claimed that no one should “underestimate the significance of Vicarious crossing this milestone,” and the company is “at the forefront of building the first truly intelligent machines.”
