Google Brain-Mapping Project Learns to Find Cats Online

Looks like I might have to change the captcha I have implemented to protect the Ninjalane Message Forum from spammers.

As detailed by the New York Times, researchers at Google have been working on a way to map the human brain. Using 10 million images pulled from YouTube videos and a connection of 16,000 processors, the team was able to teach the machines to recognize cats.

While that might seem silly, the project is noteworthy because researchers never prompted the computers to be on the lookout for cat faces. Over time, the machines just recognized the animals.

"It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items," the Times said.

The large amount of data and computing power also make the project unique.

The Captcha I use is based on a project called KittenAuth which takes pictures of cats and cars and requires the user to select all of the cats before submitting the form.  Based on what I have seen this works great to stop automated bots from registering but does very little to stop human spammers paid to post. 

It also doesn't stop human spammers from creating an account and saving the login details to a robot database.  Lucky for me both are easy to spot and with the aid of "The Ban Hammer" I can clean up the system rather quickly.

Related Web URL: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406332,00.as...