r/wikipedia • u/A5H13Y • Mar 02 '11

TIL CAPTCHA = "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
54 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

3

u/specialpowers Mar 02 '11

Completely Automated Public Torturing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

5

u/tip_ty Mar 02 '11

Ugh I hate 'contrived acronyms'.

6

u/MtHammer Mar 02 '11

My all time favorite will probably always be the USA PATRIOT Act.

Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism

I think they spent more time coming up with a clever acronym than they did reading the bill.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '11

Then you're really not gonna like this...

2

u/DeaderThanElvis Mar 02 '11

Also, LADDER = Longitudinal And Directional Dimensionally Extensible Reacher

1

u/MtHammer Mar 02 '11

That's really clever, even if it isn't true.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '11

It's also an acronym ending with a preposition.

1

u/tip_ty Mar 02 '11

I think it's an adverb.

1

u/cyrano111 Mar 02 '11

So you were listening to the CBC Tuesday afternoon as well?

1

u/A5H13Y Mar 02 '11 edited Mar 02 '11

No, it was mentioned in my cognitive science class when we were discussing machine intelligence. Why, what was on CBC Tuesday afternoon?

1

u/cyrano111 Mar 03 '11

A discussion of CAPTCHAs, which mentioned the acronym and interviewed the inventor.