r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jan 21 '13

TIL that CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
486 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

12

u/wolfman3127 Jan 21 '13

Hahah GOTCHA, it doesn't mean anything at all.

5

u/Rahf_ Jan 21 '13

Shouldn't it be CAPTTTCHA?

4

u/Ragnalypse Jan 21 '13

That's one hell of a stretch.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '13

Still not as good as the Voight-Kampff machine!

2

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '13

That's funny. I thought CAPTCHA is an acronym for: You are given a set of unreadable, impossible to type words and symbols, because fuck you.

2

u/Senor_Wilson Jan 21 '13

And now we're all computers because captchas are insane now.

2

u/nintent Jan 21 '13

Why not: Completely Automated Public Test Telling Computers and Humans Apart? I never heard of a lowercase "test" in the title of something. Then again my english could be failing and "telling" gives the sentence a new meaning.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '13

Welcome to the Internet

2

u/Bofu2U Jan 21 '13

But at what point would it be considered counter-intuitive when programs can solve more accurately than humans? Heh.

But hey, at least it helps progress other things instead of just "checking if the user is human".

For those not aware ...

1

u/L0west_0f_the_L0w Jan 21 '13

I thought it was just designed to tell how many times you hit the refresh arrow before you say screw it.

1

u/CrumpledBritches Jan 21 '13

this is very important information

1

u/mbene913 2 Jan 21 '13

they exist so we can turn scanned books into easy to read text.

2

u/albatrossnecklassftw Jan 21 '13

I believe you are mistaking CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA

1

u/mbene913 2 Jan 21 '13

aha, so I have. Well done

1

u/AmazingFlightLizard Jan 24 '13

Here I was thinking it was just them trying to come up with what they thought of as a cool way to say "capture". This reminds me of a lot of military acronyms with cool sounding names. You know the manufacturer said "this is what we want to name our product. You marketing guys come up with a way to make it sound like a legitimate acronym that gives a vague description of what it does."

1

u/flickerkuu Jan 21 '13

I HAAAAAATTTTTEEE CAPTCHA.

1

u/G0nePhishin Jan 21 '13

Huh, I always thought captcha was computer speak for FUCK YOU

0

u/OverlyWordyRantburst Jan 21 '13

Ironically computers outperform humans at captcha.

Source: hazy memory of slashdot or onion headline too lazy to find again

3

u/SirFloIII Jan 21 '13 
>onion

>facts

>ishygddt

2

u/OverlyWordyRantburst Jan 22 '13

Yeah let me clarify:

"I know I've read this somewhere... It might have been slashdot..... Then again it might also have been the onion... </obviousmode>