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Do Robots Read The News?

By: Oleg.. Research into AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence, has proceed at an incredible pace in the last century or so. However, we are still nearly as far as we ever were from creating the first truly functional android. I have no doubt that, had he lived to today, Isaac Asimov would be astonished although perhaps not surprised at the speed with which his stories have become reality. Unfortunately, tales of thinking machines and positronic brains remain nothing more then tales.

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.

Although our computers remain unable to communicate through speech, and are physically very different from us, you could well argue that they are still able to read the news. As the internet grows, web spiders and surfing robots become ever more common, especially as the amount of data available make it more important then ever that we find some way to manage it and find what we are looking for.

Programs can be created that allow not only searching the web, but also interaction with it. Meanwhile, although everyone who has a page wants people to visit it, for those of us who are running businesses online those visitors are truly essential.

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 it that separates the man from the machine? Something that any human will be able to do, but no robot could? The answer, of course, is character recognition. Humans are easily able to read text, and can even do so if it has been altered- stretched slightly, if it changes colour, or even has a small line through it. Robots can't do this. This is known as a CAPTCHA, a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

All you have to do is install a basic script onto your website, which will generate the image, and block any robots from gaining access. It's hardly difficult to do, and well worth the effort for the trouble it will save weeding out annoying comments from your forum.

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.