CAPTCHAs no more safe, says Vicarious who claims their AI software can crack up to 90% of them

By Darshik Jariwala - October, 28th 2013

CAPTCHA is at present the common and trusted method for a website to find out if a particular user is a Human or a Bot. All the major websites that we know of and rely on today use CAPTCHA for better security.

A startup called Vicarious, however, claims that a new Artificial Intelligence Software they have developed can crack up to 90 percent of the those CAPTCHAs, including the reCAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs are very widely used, even by websites such as Google, Yahoo, PayPal which are the most used websites, among others.

Vicarious – Turing Test 1: Captcha from Vicarious Inc on Vimeo

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Vicarious calls the Artificial Intelligence Software that it has built, as Recursive Cortical Network (RCN). Vicarious explains more about it saying, “Vicarious is developing machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network ™”.

Vicarious posted today that they have successfully passed their first Turing Test, which determines whether or not the machine possesses Artificial Intelligence capability. Vicarious co-founder Dr. Dileep George explains about CAPTCHA and the company’s future plans saying, “Understanding how brain creates intelligence is the ultimate scientific challenge. Vicarious has a long term strategy for developing human level artificial intelligence, and it starts with building a brain-like vision system. Modern CAPTCHAs provide a snapshot of the challenges of visual perception, and solving those in a general way required us to understand how the brain does it.” The post further states that solving CAPTCHA is only the beginning for RCN, it will have broad implication in other fields such as robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search to name a few.

About Vicarious

Vicarious was founded in 2010 by D. Scott Phoenix and Dr. Dileep George. The company mainly focuses on building Artificial Intelligence Software’s. Its investors include Good Ventures, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures.

Source: TheNextWeb

Photo Credit – Alan Levine/Flickr