i'm new to artificial intelligence but i have a huge interest in it. but i was just thinking as i registered that in many other sites when a new person is registering, the register page will ask the person to identify numbers/letters in an image for security measures. they do this so some bot can't just make thousands of member registrations. i understand that neural networks are good for recognizing patterns. couldn't someone one day soon make a bot that uses a neural network to get past that security image? just a thought

since neural networks work on a turing machine... yes.

but there are a lot more advanced pattern recognition studies (statistically and mathematically) that have a much greater application to this problem.

Like the above poster said, other more advanced methods are probably more appropriate and in fact there has been good success on this problem:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mori/gimpy/gimpy.html