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Can Androids Read The News?

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Artificial intelligence, or AI, has come pretty far in the last few years - much more then anyone really expected it would - and yet somehow, we seem to be just as far from truly intelligent systems as we ever were. No doubt, the great author Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish, especially considering how many of his predictions have come true. However, we still haven't got any positronic brains, or thinking machines such as he suggested.

So while our computers cannot talk to us, cannot think, or act as an intelligent being, they do in many ways act at least semi-intelligent. Consider the web-spider. Not a true spider, by any means, but rather a computer program designed to browse the internet and identify key pages and even phrases.

While androids cannot talk, or even walk, you might be able to make a case that they can read the news. Depends what you mean by read really. As spiders become more advanced, they are becoming increasingly useful, and increasingly dangerous. Their powerful search capability, designed for good, can also be used for evil. Or simply to annoy.

Programs and scripts can be taught not only to search the web, but also to interact with it. Everyone who has a webpage wants people to visit, but for those running an online business it is not just that they want people, but that they need people.

Particularly with sites such as forums or blogs, a huge volume of robots is a very bad thing. It is easy for a spammer to create a program that will log onto hundreds of forums, and post thousands of annoying messages. This is why it is vital that only humans can use the forms you provide. You can add little tags to your pages to ban robots, but of course, the robots you are worried about are hardly going to pay attention to this. So you need to find some way of preventing anyone who isn't human from accessing your site.

So, what is the one thing that a human can do, but a computer cannot. Ok, setting aside the obvious, it's character recognition. Computers cannot read text in an image. So, what you need, is to include some text in an image and have the user type it in. This is known as a CAPTCHA- a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. This is from the famous Turing Test, where Alan Turing proposed that to be considered intelligent, a computer must be able to communicate indistinguishably from a human through a common medium such as text.

All you have to do is install a simple program onto your website, and it will produce a small image with altered text. The visitor has to type that text into a box before they can log in, or otherwise interact with a form. This will block any robots from using it, as the robot will not be able to read the text.

In answer to the title, can a computer read the news? Yes, they can, as long as there is no CATCHA blocking their path. On the other hand, it will be quite a while yet before any computer can understand the news, as they are pretty far from being intelligent.