CHAPTER II

BASIC OF THEORY

II.1 Definition of CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is a form of challenge-response test (challenge-response test) used in

computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. This process usually
involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test that can be generated
and assessed by the computer. Because other computers cannot solve the CAPTCHA, any
user can give the correct answer will be treated as a human being.

Figure 2.1 Example of CAPTCHA (REF : https://www.quora.com/How-does-CAPTCHA-work )

Therefore, this test is sometimes referred to as a reverse Turing test, because it is

managed by the engine and is intended for humans, the inverse of the standard Turing test
that is usually maintained by humans and is intended for a machine. CAPTCHA generally
use letters and numbers from a distorted image that appears on the screen.

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II.2 History of CAPTCHA

Subsequent to that work, two teams of people have claimed to be the first to invent the
CAPTCHAs used throughout the Web today. The first team consists of Mark D. Lillibridge,
Martín Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Broder, who used CAPTCHAs in 1997 at
AltaVista to prevent bots from adding URLs to their search engine. Looking for a way to
make their images resistant to OCR attack, the team looked at the manual of their Brother
scanner, which had recommendations for improving OCR's results (similar typefaces, plain
backgrounds, etc.). The team created puzzles by attempting to simulate what the manual
claimed would cause bad OCR.

The second team to claim inventorship of CAPTCHAs consists of Luis von Ahn,
Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford, who first described CAPTCHAs in a
2003 publication and subsequently received much coverage in the popular press. Their notion
of CAPTCHA covers any program that can distinguish humans from computers, including
many different examples of CAPTCHAs.

The controversy of inventorship has been settled by the existence of a 1998 patent by
Lillibridge, Abadi, Bharat, and Broder, which predates other publications by several years.
Though the patent does not use the term CAPTCHA, it describes the ideas in detail and
precisely depicts the graphical CAPTCHAs used in the Web today.