Bots Are Better Than Humans At Cracking ‘Are You a Robot?’ Captcha Tests, Study Finds

A recent comprehensive study reveals that automated bots are substantially more efficient than humans at cracking Captcha tests, a widely used security measure on over 100 popular websites. In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds — varying in location, age, sex and educational level — to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy.

Some Captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. “The bots’ accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent),” scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots’ solving times are “significantly lower” or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases.