Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Google has broken my roman numeral captcha

Filed under: Science and Technology — Daniel Lemire @ 11:10

Maverick Woo sent me an email to let me know that Google does roman numeral arithmetic.

I can’t help but imagine the discussion between between the Google engineer and his boss:

  • (Engineer) Hi boss! I plan a new feature for our search engine… roman numeral arithmetic!
  • (Harvard MBA) What a great idea! (Thinking to himself: I need to replace this guy.)

As a basis for comparison, it seems that Yahoo! does not have this feature.

Beside my blog’s captcha, where else do you ever use roman numerals?

4 Comments »

  1. I want co come clean. I have always used Google to solve these terrifying captchas. Even this one.

    Comment by Eran — 25/3/2008 @ 15:05

  2. Not really broken!
    Computing the result is the easiest part, locating the question is the hardest.
    To me, this has the same flavor than all those misdirected AI researchs, solving, solving…
    It’s not solving logic/math questions which is problematic it’s recognising which method could apply.

    Comment by Kevembuangga — 27/3/2008 @ 3:30

  3. I guess I was inspired by your site to make this blog entry some time back: http://gauthampai.livejournal.com/58355.html

    But, as you said, right now I don’t quite see any other use of it.

    Comment by Gautham Pai — 2/4/2008 @ 9:16

  4. To answer your question, it does not tend to stop spammers much.

    Comment by Daniel Lemire — 2/4/2008 @ 12:58

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Warning: When entering a long comment, please ensure that you make copy of your text prior to submitting it. If the server should fail or if you hit a bug, you might lose your work. I am not responsible for your lost effort.

To spammers: I carefully review every single post and make sure that spam gets deleted. You are wasting your time if you are manually entering spam using this form. Read my terms of use to see what I consider to be abusive.

Example: I + II + IX= XII. Yes, you have to enter a roman numeral. (Answer must be in upper case.)

« Blog's main page

25 queries. 0.298 seconds. Valid XHTML

Powered by WordPress

© 2004-2008, Daniel Lemire (lemire at acm dot org). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Subscribe to this blog in a reader or by Email.