4.20.2009
How to solve AI: Hire 10,000 spammers to do it for you
I laughed out loud when I saw this article - its a brilliant idea. CAPTCHAs (the funky distorted text that proves you're human to various websites) have made spammers highly motivated to solve optical character recognition (OCR) problems - there's apparently a $500,000 prize to break the latest state of the art. And, if that Artificial Intelligence problem is broken, well, there are plenty of other ones to solve - anything that a human can do that a computer can't is both a good basis for next-gen CAPTCHAs (using images, maybe), and an unsolved AI problem.