CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a Carnegie-Melon project to catalog and develop tests that a computer can deliver but only a human can solve, to curtail the activities of bots, malware, and scripts. I'm working on a novel where part of the mcguffin is an effort to use genetic algorithms to turn a dataset derived from a destructive brain-scan into an intelligent model in a massively parallel computer built out of commodity hardware. The many different attempts at generating a modelled brain test out their efficacy by joining chat rooms and otherwise inserting themselves into any machine-mediated human communication (including things like spam, scams, etc) and see how long it takes for them to be accused of being a bot. I think my fictional brain-models would smoke these tests.
Bongo is a program that asks the user to solve a visual pattern recognition problem. In particular, Bongo displays two series of blocks, the left and the right series. The blocks in the left series differ from those in the right, and the user must find the characteristic that sets the two series apart. A possible left and right series are shown here.
(These two series are different because everything in the left is drawn with thick lines, while everything in the right is drawn with thin lines.)
After seeing the two series of blocks, the user is presented with four single blocks and is asked to determine whether each block belongs to the right series or to the left. The user passes the test if he or she correctly detemrines the side to which all the four blocks belong.
(via MeFi)
