Undone by Captcha

The pandemic has brought our life to a near standstill. When the lockdowns were enforced, it is the digital system that came to our rescue. Many payment apps came in hand, especially when many e-commerce platforms stopped taking cash to protect their employees.

Similarly, one could file statutory returns online without the hassle of standing in serpentine queues to file our returns.

However, life is never a smooth going vehicle. Like in all good things, one had to surmount some problems. One such challenge we had to surmount was Captcha. Captcha is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test” to distinguish humans from bots. Captcha was introduced to prevent the hacking of websites.

The Captcha comes in many forms— letters and words, a combination of letters and words, and images that we have to identify before we are allowed to log on to a site. It becomes virtually impossible, especially for a septuagenarian like me to decipher the Captcha, which, in addition to user id and password, is a requirement to log onto a website. Any error in distinguishing a letter or word prevents one from logging onto the site. Some of the sites have a string of distorted, blurry and squiggly letters and numbers, which is beyond any normal human to decipher.

Many times ‘x’ turns out to be ‘X’. Similarly, two ‘Ns’ strung together is, actually, an ‘M’. Recently, just when I thought I got the ‘W’ correct, it turned out to be two ‘Vs’. Moreover, distinguishing a ‘0’ (zero) from an ‘O’ is another challenge. Some captchas have hidden words and numbers lurking behind the main string of words, which we often tend to miss.

Many of the websites have Google’s reCaptcha, which helps to identify the Captcha an easy experience. Bridges, cars, crosswalks and hydrants are some of the images used for easy logging. On the face of it, it looks very simple but when you thought you had successfully identified all the 5 fire hydrants in the grid, you realize that you have missed an image with a small lurking snout of the fire hydrant. The result is the same: You always end up on the losing side.

My inability to decipher the string of words often plunges me into despair, besides bruising my ego. However, I recently came across a blog post, where it was mentioned that, in 2014, “Google had pitted one of its machine learning algorithms against humans in solving the most distorted text Captchas: The computer got the test right 99.8% of the time, while the humans got a mere 33%.”

I was happy that I’m not alone in failing the simple test of deciphering the Captcha. I’m now part of the majority of 77% of the people who have failed to get the Captcha right. The moral of the story is that whatever you may try to do, it is the Captcha that is the ultimate winner.