As a former philosophy student, I love to argue that everything came from philosophy. This week I’ll be discussing CAPTCHA and how these bot stopping tools are no exception to that rule.

The Turing Test

First, some background info – The Turing Test is named after Alan Turing, who proposed what is known as ‘the imitation game’ in 1950.¹ Essentially, the imitation game is a way to determine if a computer can effectively imitate a human. Similarly, a Turing test is used to to measure a computer’s ability to display human-like intelligence.¹ Turing’s ‘Imitation Game’ idea was first proposed in Mind, a philosophy journal. ²

CAPTCHA

So how do Turing Tests, which originated in philosophy, relate to CAPTCHAs? CAPTCHA stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart’.³ Like Turing tests, CAPTCHAs attempt to distinguish between computers and humans. However, CAPTCHAs are administered by computers. In a sense, the roles outlined in Turing’s proposal have been reversed. So, CAPTCHAs stem from Turing’s original proposal, which was a philosophical one and can be said to have philosophical origins.

Sources:

1. Oppy, Graham and David Dowe, “The Turing Test”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/turing-test/>.
2. Turing, Alan M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59 (October):433-60.
3. Carnegie Mellon University CyLab, “The reCAPTCHA Project,” Internet Archive, URL = <https://web.archive.org/web/20171027203659/https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/success-stories/recaptcha.html>.