Google has broken my roman numeral captcha

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?

Comments (4)

4 Comments

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

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

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.