Are you human?

Human identification protocols have been in existence for a number of years now. I am of course no techie geek to get into the intricate details of this, but it is fascinating to observe how these machinations have evolved over the years.

It started with the very boring captchas - the earliest versions with all crooked alphabets so you had to twist your neck in weird angles to decipher the alphabets scrawled together...

I am so not ashamed to admit that there have been a number of occasions when I have not got it right even for the second or the third time!

They then made captchas even more complicated with background distortion, lines struck through, till I, in frustration, vowed to never log in to that particular site again...

I seriously wonder if a machine would be more capable of deducing what the f*** the captcha says rather than human beings - so maybe the algorithm could be reversed. If the captcha is not replicated successfully, voila, it's a human! 

I personally prefer the sensibly written two word captchas such as the one below. The techies, please care to explain why technologically this may not be as good! These can get hilarious too. I am sure we all have once in a while giggles at the words we have got to recapture... "love", "feeling", "retard"...

Then there are these psychedelic ones that make me feel like puking! Animated GIFs? Giving me a break!

Ofcourse, then there are those for the mathematically inclined. 2+2 kinds! 

I swear to god I get a little nervous around these. Suddenly, what if they throw some quadratic equation at my face or some trignometric tan, cot s*** that I sucked at in school....

I really enjoy doing the logical ones. Have you seen something like this:

Imagine the existential angst of the person doing such a captcha. The obvious answer for food is the Z (the rice bowl) but aren't human beings (X) food for some species too. I wonder if there is some forum for such misleading captchas!

And finally the captchas that made me go on this trip. The smart questions! The ones that apparently try to make it fun for you. So this is what I got in one particular portal:

I was actually dumbfounded for a sec. I wondered if this was a trick question. Who the hell is Lisa? Some character in a movie, and they want the real name? (I told you I have a lot of time on my hands these days - so my imagination does run wild once in a while...)

Another smart question that I wonder how most men would answer is (they actually have questions like these, I am serious):

"How many colors in the list: pink, magenta, fuchsia, purple?"

And now a trick question for you: how many men do you know who would answer "one" and not "four" to the above question? :D :P

(Ducks with all the brick bats from the the color blind sex...

...ooops there I go again....)

[Image source: Google Images]