Hotcaptcha is a mash-up 'are you a human' test which uses photos from HotOrNot to determine if a user on the other end of the net is a human or a person. Here's a sample:
You can vote on just boyz, just girlz, or a mix of both.It's really kind of a creepy experience... looking at 6 people who statistically rank as 3 or lower and 3 people who rank as 8 or higher. You don't normally see that kind of thing in a club in real life. I mean, you see ugly people all the time, (say, at Wal-Mart, or anywhere in Midwest America) but you don't normally find dispersed among them in a 1-to-3 ratio extremely hot people... and this is a good thing (for most people) because it creates the 'office pretty' effect and the 'sacred cow' phenomenon!
We've all felt the effects of the 'office pretty' person... that individual who is empirically, not that attractive, but when you place hir in a room with even less attractive people, over time, sie becomes more and more attractive. Given enough time in a job, a 5 can become a 9, in other words.
You can also see the 'sacred cow' effect when ordinary girls go to an engineering school dominated by boys. All of a sudden, with the lack of competition, they are magicially tranformed to the state of goddess. Their sense of entitlement is almost cute. I imagine this happens to boys in say, Elementary Education and Nursing courses too, though presumably both take place inside the larger liberal arts system where attractive boys can be found.
But I digress... anyway, to date, this is the most amusing (and at the same time, appalling) !Turing Test I've come across. What's a !Turing Test? Why, it's the opposite of a Turing Test, of course! What's a Turing Test? Put simply, it's a test imagined by Alan Turing in a paper he wrote in 1950 (you can read it here) which has come to be the foundation of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
Because I'm too lazy to type this fresh, allow me to quote from the book of Wikipedia:
The test was inspired by a party game known as the "Imitation Game", in which a man and a woman go into separate rooms, and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back. In this game, both the man and the woman aim to convince the guests that they are the woman. Turing proposed a test employing the imitation game as follows: "We now ask the question, 'What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, 'Can machines think?'" (Turing 1950) Later in the paper he suggested an "equivalent" alternate formulation involving a judge conversing only with a computer and a man.
Turing originally proposed the test in order to replace the emotionally charged and (for him) meaningless question "Can machines think?" with a more well-defined one. The advantage of the new question, he said, was that it "drew a fairly sharp line between the physical and intellectual capacities of a man." (Turing 1950)
And thus, we see how the history of computing, artificial intelligence, and HotOrNot is linked to boys trying to pass as girls.
Now that we're up to speed, I'd like to suggest that the real question should be can the system of man+machine be considered to think? For this, the judge is your consciousness (pause on that for a moment)... the 'man' is your physical body, and the 'machine' is whatever you are interfacing with on the other side of your computer screen. Will your consciousness decide that the combination of your body plus machine be considered to think?
Once you grok this, you'll probably come to the same conclusion as Alan Turing, that the original quesitons of 'can machines think' is fairly meaningless, and misses the point entirely, kinda like this mashup of HotOrNot.
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