I was signing up for a free account with some Mind-Mapping software, when I was presented with a familiar site: a captcha.
For those of you out there with less background in computer mumbo-jumbo, a captcah is a small computer generated image of numbers and letters. Usually the image has some “noise” in it (random specks of varying colors preventing it from being a perfect image of text), or letters in wierd locations relative to each other (some up high in the image or down low), or random phrases, or whatever.
The point of the captcha is verification. Not so much verification that you are who you say you are. Verification that you are what you say you are: that you are human, and not just some bot-program signing up for free accounts or sending random comments and emails, etc.
Recently I’ve noticed a lot more captchas using phrases of real words rather than random numbers and letters. There’s a usability component at work here. Today I was presented with the phrase “Coyest Sunday”.
There’s something about that phrase that just hit a note with me. Beyond their basic definition and use, i’m not that familiar with the algorithms behind captchas. I’m sure there’s some dictionary out there, and maybe there’s a bit of logic that randomly matches an acceptable adjective to an acceptable noun.
It’s hard to believe that a random algorithm could create something that’s so striking to me. It’s seems rather poetical.
Maybe I should change the name of this blog.
