You can download open-source software that can read text and more out of an image. I'm pretty sure my computer at home can't tell me if the material its sitting on matches the material in its inventory. What's your point?
And yet Capcha and ReCapcha remain one of the main methods of telling bots apart from humans.
I'm pretty sure your computer doesn't have an inventory.
My point is, the creators won't implement it, and so far, most of the suggested ideas can already be achieved through other means.
Why do you think CAPTCHA has to be so warped and scrambled? Because computers could easily read plain text. There are commercial products out there capable of reading books, etc. And built-in to windows is the ability to write on a touchpad and have it be converted into text.
Putting stuff into chests could be acomplished with buildcraft. Getting stuff out of turtles could as well. Transmitting messages could be accomplished before rednet. Mining turtles can dig just as well as digger turtles and chop wood just as well as feller turtles. So what's your point? Should those things have never been added either because they can be done other ways? Being able to read signs adds interesting possibilites for communicating between players and turtles, at the very least.
If you know what ReCapcha's second purpose is, you'll know why it makes my argument stronger.
Some of the images used by ReCapcha are taken from hand written books. Computers can't read them because the hand writing is too joined up or only readable by humans. If you were to scroll something down quickly, it would be scruffy, but probably readable by other humans. It would however be pretty much illegible to computers.
Some people don't want/don't have build craft, Rednet sped up message transfer. I can't defend the making of felling turtles or digging turtles since aside from crafty turtles and attacking turtles, the other turtles do seem slightly pointless when the mining turtles can do those jobs.
And my point stands that the creators are still unlikely to permanently implement it, hence someone made a peripheral for it.
Not to be argumentative, but a computer that I can point at signs and read them… I carry one in my pocket, it's called an iphone. Not perfectly reliable, of course. Reading isn't that hard, it's understanding that's hard, and obviously turtles would only understand signs they were programmed to understand.
I agree that using signs to communicate between turtles is a bit silly, but I could see applications for this as a way for players to leave notes to modify the way turtles will behave. I wouldn't call it a must-have feature or anything, but I just don't see anything overtly WRONG with the feature.
If I wrote something in neat joined up handwriting, could your iphone accurately read that and convert it into a string variable?
Even with the most up to date software, there are some things only humans can read, and logically minecraft signs would be written with handwriting, thus some would be illegible to machines.
I'm not saying it's hideously wrong, just that it's illogical, unlikely to be installed as a permanent thing by the creators and generally most of the features given as examples of its usage can already be done without it.
