Robots are now cracking puzzles that only humans should be able to solve

Picture:

iStock / mennovandijk ; Flickr / Wufoo Team

One of humanity's final barriers against the rise of the robots has just fallen.

Impenetrable, iconic and known to take even humans two or three frustrated goes to crack, the captcha has been finally been defeated.

It took just minutes for an artificially intelligent machine to crack those jumbled-up text sequences we all know and hate.

Picture: Flickr/Jake Spurlock

The distorted text in captchas is designed to confuse spamming bots.

Though some machine learning systems can solve captchas, it takes millions of images to train them up.

But this new bot from AI start-up Vicarious cracked captchas after just a few minutes of training and only a few hundred example characters.

Referring to this human-like ability to generalise and learn from very little data, Vicarious co-founder Dilep George told Live Science:

This is definitely a small step.
But these are the things you need to consider if you want to go in the direction of general artificial intelligence.

Vicarious says that its bot mimics the way the human brain identifies objects and could pave the way fore more human-like artificial intelligence.