Google cracks its own CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) verification with its own algorithm

Algorithmic trading or chess are fantastic examples of things computers do better than us, but no indication of consciousness or of an ability to pass a real Turing test.

In the 1950s, British researcher Alan Turing seriously interrogated the question of whether machines could think. He eventually decided it was meaningless to try and answer this and instead posited: Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted," Turing wrote in 1950, amidst significant philosophical and ideological objections.

Imitators, like Google's technology, abound but it seems that Turing's vision – of universal acknowledgement of machines capable of thought – is still some way off.

Know more - http://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html