Singularity on the Plane

Everybody knows captcha, the verification image we meet everytime we register something to help keep spammers off the board. It usually involves retyping a badly distorted or other visually-abnormal text. Boring, because What You See Is What You Type (WYSIWYT).

Every once in a while someone came up with a clever CAPTCHA, like those simple arithmetic CAPTCHAs where you are asked to do an addition.

Recently, I registered on a Japanese site FC2. It has this never-before-seen (by me) CAPTCHA:

You, got it right! They spell a series of numbers in kana and we need to retype it using the all-too-familiar 1 2 3. Of course, the image is still littered with those bacteria we’ve been accustomed to.

If you’re studying Japanese, please try to answer in the comments. I’ll give you… a nice reply comment :).

PS: CAPTCHA is actually an acronym so it is written in capitals. However I very much prefer it to write it like: “captcha”.