

CAPTCHA Busted? AI Company Claims Break of Internet’s Favorite Protection System - adamb_
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/captcha-busted/

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rspeer
They have released no code and no paper, and failed at the demo that
ScienceNOW asked for.

Here's their explanation for the failure, quoted in the article:

> So why didn’t our demo work on the checkerboard pattern? Before the image is
> presented to our algorithm, it has to pass through a retina+LGN kind of
> processing (it is a basic, common-to-all-CAPTCHAS pre-processing). In the
> demo, we had a specialized retina which was faster and gave a few percentage
> points more accuracy on reCAPTCHA; the downside being it not working well on
> the checkerboard pattern. (Or any pattern where some portions of the letter
> are black and some portions of the letter are white). Its just like putting
> on sunglasses being specialization we add to our eyes for going out in the
> sun, which causes us to see some other patterns not as well. It is not a
> fundamental flaw and we have tested that our system works with the
> checkerboard pattern as well

That's a lot of fancy words to say that they overfit to their training data.

That makes this sound like a very typical result in supervised machine
learning (if it's a result at all). They have used an algorithm to learn a
brittle heuristic that works in the cases it was trained to work on. Whether
they have a Recursive Cortical Network™ that Emulates The Human Brain™ is
irrelevant.

