Friday, October 28, 2005
[network] Your Turing test is now online
During the second world war, the German Navy employed the most advanced cryptography technology that was available at the time: the Enigma machine. The codes were cracked by one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the time: Alan Turing. Later in the war big computing devices were developed to automate the process of cracking the code. Look here for more information on this story.
Working with these machines, Turing came to the conclusion that universal computing devices exist, in the sense that no machine could be more powerful than such a universal device. He developed a (theoretical) example that is now referred to as the Turing machine. Later, developing the field that is now known as artificial intelligence he investigated if humans could be 'smarter' than machines. He proposed a game: 'the imitation game' that would test if such a device was intelligent. This game is now known as the Turing test, and you can find more information on it here and here.
I ran into a practical everyday example of a reverse Turing test while I was exploring website security measures for a customer. The most basic assurance you typically want to have about the identity of your visitors is that they are human. The non human users are typically bots that try to create large amounts of fake online identities for some illicit reason. So, your website needs an online Turing test (a reverse one, beacuse a program is trying to find out wether or not the other side is human). This is exactly what a number of websites are already doing. The following is an example drawn from the Yahoo process for registering a new user. You are supposed to type in the letters you see, and the assumption is that this pattern matching is currently too hard to do with a program.
Working with these machines, Turing came to the conclusion that universal computing devices exist, in the sense that no machine could be more powerful than such a universal device. He developed a (theoretical) example that is now referred to as the Turing machine. Later, developing the field that is now known as artificial intelligence he investigated if humans could be 'smarter' than machines. He proposed a game: 'the imitation game' that would test if such a device was intelligent. This game is now known as the Turing test, and you can find more information on it here and here.
I ran into a practical everyday example of a reverse Turing test while I was exploring website security measures for a customer. The most basic assurance you typically want to have about the identity of your visitors is that they are human. The non human users are typically bots that try to create large amounts of fake online identities for some illicit reason. So, your website needs an online Turing test (a reverse one, beacuse a program is trying to find out wether or not the other side is human). This is exactly what a number of websites are already doing. The following is an example drawn from the Yahoo process for registering a new user. You are supposed to type in the letters you see, and the assumption is that this pattern matching is currently too hard to do with a program.
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Recently I discovered that this technique is called Captcha, "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. See wikipedia.
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In Turing Test Two, two players A and B are again being questioned by a human interrogator C. Before A gave out his answer (labeled as aa) to a question, he would also be required to guess how the other player B will answer the same question and this guess is labeled as ab. Similarly B will give her answer (labeled as bb) and her guess of A's answer, ba. The answers aa and ba will be grouped together as group a and similarly bb and ab will be grouped together as group b. The interrogator will be given first the answers as two separate groups and with only the group label (a and b) and without the individual labels (aa, ab, ba and bb). If C cannot tell correctly which of the aa and ba is from player A and which is from player B, B will get a score of one. If C cannot tell which of the bb and ab is from player B and which is from player A, A will get a score of one. All answers (with the individual labels) are then made available to all parties (A, B and C) and then the game continues. At the end of the game, the player who scored more is considered had won the game and is more "intelligent".
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http://turing-test-two.com/ttt/TTT.pdf
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In Turing Test Two, two players A and B are again being questioned by a human interrogator C. Before A gave out his answer (labeled as aa) to a question, he would also be required to guess how the other player B will answer the same question and this guess is labeled as ab. Similarly B will give her answer (labeled as bb) and her guess of A's answer, ba. The answers aa and ba will be grouped together as group a and similarly bb and ab will be grouped together as group b. The interrogator will be given first the answers as two separate groups and with only the group label (a and b) and without the individual labels (aa, ab, ba and bb). If C cannot tell correctly which of the aa and ba is from player A and which is from player B, B will get a score of one. If C cannot tell which of the bb and ab is from player B and which is from player A, A will get a score of one. All answers (with the individual labels) are then made available to all parties (A, B and C) and then the game continues. At the end of the game, the player who scored more is considered had won the game and is more "intelligent".
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http://turing-test-two.com/ttt/TTT.pdf
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