Every time human beings waste a day on verification codes, a Monkey King is released from the foot of the Five Elements Mountain

The verification code is called CAPTCHA in English, which is the abbreviation of Completely Autcomated Public Turingtest to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The literal translation is "a fully automatic Turing test that distinguishes between computers and humans."

The Turing test is a well-known experiment in the artificial intelligence circle. The experimenter asks a machine and a human some questions. If the experimenter cannot tell the difference between the two, then the machine passes the Turing test. The verification code is the reverse and variant of the Turing test.

In the twenty-one years since the verification code was invented, the forms and types of verification codes have become more and more diverse. From the initial simple input of numbers and letters, it has evolved into icon-clicking verification, and then more complicated rotating out-of-order picture verification. As time goes by, verification codes appear more and more often in our lives. Recently, there was a blog that calculated the time humans wasted on verification codes every day. The calculation results written on the blog are:

Five hundred years.

According to the data, it takes an average of 32 seconds for users to complete verification code verification. There are 4.6 billion Internet users worldwide. Assume that a typical Internet user receives a verification code every 10 days.

The calculation results indicate that humans spend 500 years every day just to prove that we are not machines.

In addition, the verification code also brings some real problems to Internet users:

Efficiency: When we verify, time is passing by inadvertently.

Accessibility: Users are always assumed to have the physical and cognitive abilities needed to solve the test, but this may not be the case. For example, visual impairment may make the task of image verification impossible.

Cultural knowledge: The number of people who have seen fire hydrants on the earth is very small, and the number of people who speak English is also very small. The color of taxis in different cities is also different, so the pictures that require you to click on fire hydrants and taxis are not reasonable.

Interaction on mobile devices: Cell phones and mobile devices are the main means of Internet access in most parts of the world, and they are usually the only means. The verification code is more difficult to execute on the small screen, and puts pressure on its data plan and battery usage.

The 500-year result sounds incredible, right? After seeing the data, some netizens suggested that the verification code should be cancelled, but some netizens felt that this is nothing compared to the benefits of the website. After all, the time humans spend every morning looking for socks can only add up to that.

People have been wasting many years on bad user interfaces and wrong code. This over-exaggerates the actual cost of ordinary people and neglects the benefits we get from websites that have not been flooded by robots.

How many years did people waste scratching their noses and finding lost socks? This is a stupid indicator.

There are also netizens who want to "return their body by their own way"

I want to send a verification code to the automatic dialing software that sends spam to my mobile phone. Before my mobile phone vibrates, it must answer my question, "What year is this year".