I read this as Google basically giving up on CAPTCHA. Let me explain. For a while google had one of the hardest CAPTCHAs but bots just keep getting better, and

I read this as Google basically giving up on CAPTCHA. Let me explain. For a while google had one of the hardest CAPTCHAs but bots just keep getting better, and they were cracking it more and more often. But you can't just make the CAPTCHA even more difficult, it was already fooling a lot of the humans. Note that a bot does not need to successfully solve it 100% or even 90% of the time. I'm not sure of what the exact figure is but at some point the bot reaches parity with humans even if it only succeeds say 25% of the time. That's because on average now it only takes 4 guesses to guess correctly. And I don't think reCAPTCHA is stronger then the multicolored CAPTCHA google had (still has?) I think google is realizing that they just can not stop the best CAPTCHA cracking bots, maybe they can stop a lot of them, or a lot of the not so smart bots. But they also can't just give on CAPTCHA, and let anyone and any bot in without even trying. Thus reCAPTCHA because you might as well do a little public good while you're at it. If nothing else, you've at least made some old texts more readable.