CAPTCHA

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

CAPTCHA is a contrive acronym (see below) that describes the test on
online forms where you have to enter some scrambled or distorted letters
to gain access to a web site.  Not in OED.


A. L. Coates, H. S. Baird, and R. J. Fateman, "Pessimal print: A Reverse
Turing Test," in Proc. of the Sixth Intl. Conf. on Document Analysis and
Recognition, Seattle, WA, September 2001, pp. 1154--1158.

"Stimulated by the "chat room problem" posed by Udi Manber of Yahoo!,
and influenced by the CAPTCHA project [BAL00] of Manuel Blum et al of
Carnegie-Mellon Univ., we propose a variant of the Turing test using
pessimal print: that is, low-quality images of machine-printed text
synthesized pseudo-randomly over certain ranges of words, typefaces, and
image degradations."

[The above cite implies the term was current at the website
www.captcha.net. in 2000; I can't find a "citeable" reference there.]


"Human or Computer? Take This Test" SARA ROBINSON New York Times Dec 10,
2002; pg. F4 col 2

"The researchers decided to call their puzzles Captchas, an acronym for
Completely Automated Publick Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans
Apart (on the Web at www.captcha.net)."

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