Tougest CAPTCHA Yet?
You may already be familiar with the concept of the CAPTCHA. If you’ve not have heard of it, you’ll probably still have used one.
It’s where they show you a picture of some stretched letters, often on a distorted background and ask you to type them in, to prove you aren’t a computer. Every now and again you’ll come across one with some sort of audio alternative to help cater for people with vision problems, too.
Well, they’ve now devised a maths one. I would probably have recommended that they started with something like “if you take the number seventeen and then multiply it by three, what do you get?”, as I think the one shown below is possibly a little too tricky:
Find the least real zero of the polynomial:
The Quantum Random Bit Generator Service, as reported on the New Scientist Technology Blog
Hmm… in this case presumably the humans are the ones who wander off and try a different site instead?
Hello. I am 
Just remember that 1^n = 1. The rest is left as an exercise….
Yeah, I know that once you sit down with it, you can work it out, and it’s maybe not as difficult as it first appears (someone at worked looked at it and said “that’s easy”, at which point I took a proper look and solved it) — but it doesn’t half look intimidating: and I did further maths… (although admittedly 16 years ago now)
Lol, that’s great. I can’t prove I’m human, though
I noted the post over there really got off topic about the whole math vs maths debate — not that there’s anything to debate. Each country has their own way. If anything I have to concede to the UK methods since you guys have been doing this whole English thing long before we mucked it up.