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What is a CAPTCHA?

#757 | 2:02 |

Tutorials

Monday July 19, 2010

Even if you don't know

what CAPTCHA stands for

, you've more than likely run into them while browsing the Internet. They're those jumbled up letters and numbers that you're often told to type back in before creating a new email address. It turns out that this exercise is actually a test to

differentiate between humans and computers

. These

CAPTCHA tests

have evolved quite a bit since their creation.

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Show Notes

- CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

- CAPTCHAs are intended to be difficult for machines to figure out.

- This quality also makes it hard for some humans to figure them out.

- For example, if letters or numbers are crowded, they may resemble something other than the answer.

- CAPTCHAs have evolved quite a bit since their first use.

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