Google CAPTCHA cracked accidentally when the Internet giant was busy developing a new algorithm to primarily read street numbers for the Google Street View. Will the dependence on text distortions as the main differentiating factor between human v/s machines cease to exist?

As a result of an advanced risk analysis performed on the internet search giant's new street-view technology, researchers came across a flaw in CAPTCHA challenge response tests, and the Google CAPTCHA cracked accidentally during the research.

The researchers at Google stumbled upon "this new algorithm that can be used to read CAPTCHA puzzles and decipher the hardest distorted text puzzles from reCAPTCHA with over 99% accuracy," Vinay Shet, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA stated in the Google Online Security Blog post.

With an intent to make Google maps even more useful the web search giant has been working on a new system that helps locate addresses even more accurately, using technology from the Google street view and reCAPTCHA teams. "This technology finds and reads street numbers in Street View, and correlates those numbers with existing addresses to pinpoint their exact location on Google Maps," Shet added.

These findings have been described in a scientific paper at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), which shows the system is able to accurately detect and read difficult numbers in Street View with 90% accuracy.

As the Google CAPTCHA cracked accidentally - the act of simply identifying the text in CAPTCHA puzzles accurately, doesn't mean the reCAPTCHA in itself is broken or ineffective. On the contrary, these findings help Google to build additional safeguards against bad factors in reCAPTCHA.

Google is definitely on its way to make a strong point that "the act of typing in the answer to a distorted image should not be the only factor" in determining a human versus a machine, PCMag quotes.

Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009, which improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. The company also says that it's made significant improvements to reCAPTCHA that will provide "additional safeguards" against malicious software.