The term CAPTCHA may sound odd at first but honestly we’re all using it everyday of our lives. The Internet is a platform that allows us to communicate in quick and economic manner. However, this has its own problems because the Internet is also inundated with spammers and there’s lot of spam and junk mail that’s doing the rounds.CAPTCHA is the acronym for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In most of the web portal development sites it refers to the tests that we have to complete if we wish to send a mail or document. There are diverse types of CAPTCHA configurations; most commonly we deal with the ones that have a unique mix of numbers and alphabets with maybe a line drawn across them. The letters aren’t written straight and it takes just a few seconds for users to key in what’s typed in the prompt box. This little experiment may seem unnecessary to a few people but it’s a very powerful tool that internet users have at their disposal.
The computer is an elegant device but has its own limitations. A CAPTCHA is a procedure wherein a computer asks any user to complete a test. Strangely the computer has the brainpower to create and grade the test, but can’t solve it. As such this minor challenge-response test can determine whether users are human or bots because users entering the right answer are accepted as human because of the computers incapacity to solve a CAPTCHA.
