Work at home and make 550$ dollers per day. Free rolex and herbal viagra.
HA! I just HAD to pretend my software had beaten gizmag's captcha.

Makes me sad. Will someone beat them with sticks when they sell that algorithm to spam bot operators?
As they saying goes, "artificial intelligence is no match for human stupidity".

90% success rate?
It's a lot better at CAPTCHA than I am...

OCR is like captchas. Could they use this for really accurate ocr?

@Keith Reeder
Haha, me too. Delicious irony.

@John,
I think this has good potential to be applied to OCR tech.
With regards to the accuracy, most websites will give you several attempts before lockout, so if it is 90% first go, it will likely defeat most systems after about three goes.
And if Captcha tries to be more tricky by adding multi coloured lines or placing the text sideways, this kind of algorithm would likely be able to be updated in time to accommodate.
The only way I can think this algorithm would get unstuck is if the letters are dashed, because the vectoring algorithm may get confused about the flow of the line, where as a human brain might fill in the gaps.

Now that captchas can be solved, what will be used to stop bots? Riddles? identifying objects in pictures? Optical illusions?

I think something like motion captchas @ http://www.josscrowcroft.com/demos/motioncaptcha/ could be modified successfully enough that the algorithms would have to be AI like in intelligence to figure them out. If you changed them randomly enough it would be hard.

Remove the concept of captcha!
http://keypic.com

I replaced the captchas on many of my client's websites with email confirmations. After submitting the form, the visitor must click the link in the confirmation email before the form data is used. If the link in the email is not clicked within a specified number of minutes the form data is deleted.
In addition, the visitor is asked a question about the form data on the page that appears when he/she clicks the confirmation link in the email. If his/her answer does not match the previously submitted form data that data is deleted.
Visitors always know what data they entered into the form, but bots wouldn't know what information the page is requesting even if they were to click the link in the confirmation email -- which they also never do because bots do not receive email.
Bottom line: There have always been more effective ways to prevent bots than by using captcha, and this is one of them. My clients will never have to worry about this new captcha-reading software.
Sincerely, owkaye at gmail dot com