emlgsh

He built the reputation that fills seats and makes his shit movies insanely profitable with a pretty legendary early career, not the kind of thing you can achieve without talent.

The gist of why captchas can be hard to read (and I don't think Google are terrible - I can read them probably 9 out of 10 times, while I've seen a few third-party captchas that were so unreadable I just gave up on submitting the forms in question) is that they're designed to beat automated attempts at form submission.

When bots (whether they're simple spam e-mail scripts being run brute-force on contact forms or complex responsive algorithms accessing personal/financial data based on logged traffic/keystroke records) hit a form they have to decipher its contents and act upon those contents in a meaningful way, typically by submitting a response to the system that mimics an actual valid form entry with all the appropriate data (name, e-mail, &etc...) in the appropriate and expected fields.

Introducing a randomly generated image that must be interpreted to proceed into the mix puts a massive barrier to access up, for an automated system. Literate humans can interpret words written in languages they can read (or even gibberish depicted in alphabets they're familiar with), even if the letters have been warped, distorted, or are broken in some way. The brain's just good that sort of pattern recognition, it can recognize a "close enough" representation.

Machine systems, with image processing, rely on algorithmic behaviors (if case A, perform action B), and reading text in such a fashion relies on detection of unbroken arcs (like those found in the letter 'c'), or a discrete series of straight lines at appropriate relative angles to one-another (like the letter 'A'). That' s a gross oversimplification, but it gives you the idea. Even if it looks like they're doing something closer to the human "close enough" behavior, it's just because they're leveraging computing power to perform thousands of simultaneous algorithmic pattern-recognition behaviors that approximate intelligent human interpretation.

By adding other detectable arc and line patterns to the image (background text that you filter out immediately but a computer cannot identify as irrelevant), distorting existing arc and line patterns, and inverting colors (so that what is and is not an arc or line is similarly inverted), you confuse, probably fatally, a machine system's attempt to interpret the image's contents. It'll fall flat, or generate false results, since the distortions (let's call them "noise") make the image such that rules governing pattern-recognition of plain text letters and numbers no longer applies to it.

So the more noise you add, like the examples above (all of which I chose since they appear in the image you created), or others like multiple colors or bisecting certain segments of text horizontally or vertically, with lines or blank space, the less likely it is that a machine system will be able to interpret it. However, and this is the "gotcha": machine systems are being improved upon all the time. First-generation captchas are almost all instantly breakable now - they relied on something simple like low-contrast lettering or a single perfectly straight line passing through each word.

New means of obfuscation were introduced, new pattern-recognition behaviors emerged, ad infinitum. What happens, with unreadable captchas, is that an obfuscation method is introduced, ostensibly to confuse an automated system and prevent a bot from submitting, that prevents human comprehension as much as it breaks algorithmic pattern recognition, if not more so, which returns to the original behavior - if neither a human nor a computer can interpret your captcha, then you can't tell people and bots apart, as if you had no captcha at all.

Some of the really bad ones seem to have been designed off the idea that humans and computers recognize image patterns similarly, and so would do things like giving the whole captcha an eye-searingly cyan background, and running perfectly uniform magenta circles through the text at regular intervals - this particular example being something a decently written algorithm will demolish in seconds, while a human claws out the bleeding, smoking ruins of their eyeballs.

TL;DR: Attempts to confuse robots are sometimes just as confusing to humans.

I bet they even use expect us to use forks, and eat their frozen single-serving meals outside of the shower, while not drinking cheap vodka with a straw, and not even sobbing uncontrollably!

I'm going to start using "meditation and yoga" as euphemisms for my therapeutic drinking.

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