What is CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. To prevent spammers from using bots to automatically fill out forms, CAPTCHA programmers will generate an image containing distorted images of a string of numbers and letters. Computers cannot determine what the numbers and letters are from the image but humans have great pattern recognition abilities and will be able to fairly accurately determine the string of numbers and letters. By entering the numbers and letters from the image in the validation field, the application can be fairly assured that there is a human client using it. To read more look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha