Key challenge to artificial intelligence overcome - 'Vicarious' image recognition defeats CAPTCHA 10/27/2013 - 00:00 Captchas, those hard-to-read jumbles of letters and numbers that many websites use to foil spammers and automated bots, aren’t necessarily impossible for computers to handle. An artificial-intelligence company called Vicarious says its technology can solve numerous types of Captchas more than 90 percent of the time.