Do Androids Read Newspapers?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has come pretty far in the last few years - much more then anyone really expected it would - and yet somehow, we seem to be just as far from truly intelligent systems as we ever were. No doubt, the great author Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish, especially considering how many of his predictions have come true. However, we still haven't got any positronic brains, or thinking machines such as he suggested.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of intelligence with which our computers usually act, they do occasionally show human-like insights and actions. To give you one example, look at how robots can be created to browse the internet. Not physical robots, of course, but small programs that can go online and surf the web. Used most commonly be search engines, these little scripts can read pages almost as well as a human can.

While androids cannot talk, or even walk, you might be able to make a case that they can read the news. Depends what you mean by read really. As spiders become more advanced, they are becoming increasingly useful, and increasingly dangerous. Their powerful search capability, designed for good, can also be used for evil. Or simply to annoy.

Computer programs can now be taught to not merely search the internet, but also to use forms and interact with webpages. Everyone who runs a website wants visitors, but if you are running an online business you don't just want visitors- you need them.

Having hundreds of robots running through your website is not just useless, but actively unhelpful, as it will make it impossible to tell just how many real humans you get as well as using up all your valuable bandwidth. Although you can put a file on your server to tell robots you do not wish them to access it, it is only the law abiding ones that will obey it, and these are not the problem.

The answer to this is the one thing that a human can do easily, but no robot ever could Optical recognition. Computers cannot read a picture, so if you simply ask the visitor to copy some text from a small picture into a box, then you will immediately block the robots from entering. This is known as CAPTCHA, and is becoming extremely common, precisely because it is so effective.

All you have to do is install a basic script onto your website, which will generate the image, and block any robots from gaining access. It's hardly difficult to do, and well worth the effort for the trouble it will save weeding out annoying comments from your forum.

In answer to the title, can a computer read the news? Yes, they can, as long as there is no CATCHA blocking their path. On the other hand, it will be quite a while yet before any computer can understand the news, as they are pretty far from being intelligent.

Article Source: http://www.exclusive-article.com

The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his ingenious new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.

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