Hacking Captcha with non-artificial intelligence
Nov/110
Nowadays I am looking through twitter api (twitter4j) and trying to learn twitter services as I want to find out how many times status containing the words ’steve jobs died’ or ‘want buy mazda 3′ tweeted. As you just noticed using tweets as a source of information, it is possible to find out which car is popular nowadays… examples can be extended far different points …
however as the company i am working is restricting access to twitter, I couldn’t use twitter api. but hold on I can also do that by using google searches. if you type site:twitter.com inurl:”/status” steve jobs died in the google search box you will get lots of tweets apprising death of steve jobs to people. What’s more is if you have a programming background you can get search result in you program to analyse. By doing that, for instance, you may find out peoples’ impression; if they are happy or unhappy… I know it was a silly example but you can deal with it 
At this point another problem emerges. After a few sequence of requests, google get suspicious if you are a robot and asks you a captch question. for those who doesn’t know captch may just skip reading this post 
or check wiki.
Ok now we know that captcha is a common problem for robots trying to hack web sites or collecting data but how to deal with it? up to now many methods has emerged mostly using artificial intelligence (specifically anns) but I have another idea (well I have no idea if people has already tought or are presently using), solving this problem not with ai but with non-artificial intelligences called human beings . why don’t we ask captchas to other people and give rewards to those answering correctly? Assume we have an online game and if a user answers a captch correctly, give him/her additional chips/resources or whatever.
Here is the diagram of the entities represented with capical letter prefixes and actions represented with number prefixes.
hacking captch
At the first step our robot sends a search request to google, google either sends the result or asks for a captcha. if it is a captcha our robot sends the request to our web site and asks to real users. if any of the users answers, our site sends the request to the robot back and redirects it to the google with the answer. if the answer is true, system gives a present to the user.
that’s all for now. if you have any questions or ideas please don’t hesitate to give me feedbacks and at least leave a comment.
Mind Confusing Interview Questions
Nov/092
Not everyone but quite a lot of people get annoyed with frustrating interview questions, especially the ones working in gaming industry. Here are some of the questions you may also get frustrated.
1) As far as a I heard from a friend of mine this question was asked during a google phone interview;
In a virtual country all the families want to have one and only one male baby (boy) and they really insist of having that baby; they contiue giving a birth until they get the boy and they stop having baby after that.
To give an example, let sey there are only 3 families; Family A,B,C
Family A gets the boy after 4 births
G G G B
and Family B gets the boy in the first place
B
and Family C gets it after 10 tries
G G G G G G G G G B
as a result, the number of girls is 12 and boys is 3.
What would you expect the percent of the population of boys to be in this country?
The result is not that striking: 0.5