What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow ...
that should fox them.
An online forum is using chess puzzles as CAPTCHAs rather than the more traditional challenge-response tests which ask the user to identify distorted text. The CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a way for a website or online service to establish that a human has come calling …
... if a puzzle is to be easy enough for a reasonably competent chess player to solve, then an average PC running gnuchess will also be able to do it. Massive horsepower was only required to defeat grandmasters because their game is at a *much* higher level than that of even the most talented players in a normal chess club.
No it's because grandmasters cheat. They memorize all the possible moves before the game even starts and some of them cast spells during the match. I know this because i used to be a grandmaster myself years ago, but I couldn't cope with the extravagant lifestyle and all the drugs so I switched to work in IT.
"No it's because grandmasters cheat."
I'll always remember a story I heard years ago, probably not true, but good all the same.
During one of these Human vs Machine chess tournaments, the Grand-Master complained that the Computer made an illegal move. The programmers were adament that their code was performing correctly as they had programmed it to only perform legal moves as per the rules of the game.
They subsequently ripped apart the code and discovered that the computer had indeed 'learned' an illegal move. It transpired that the Grand-Master had played the exact same move earlier in the tournament, and continued to win that match. The computer (which was not programed to error-check its opponants - After all, Grand-Masters know the rules... right?) had thus integrated that illegal move into it's database.
"Grandmaster skill not required... if a puzzle is to be easy enough for a reasonably competent chess player to solve, then an average PC running gnuchess will also be able to do it."
Maybe that's not the idea.
Maybe the idea is to stop people who can't figure out how chess pieces move from using the forum.
And this I applaud.
Can we expand it to the entire Internet?
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This is a rare example of a situation where security by obscurity really works well. Because each spam posted is of marginal benefit, it's only worth doing if they can post thousands with minimal effort. So when a small site implements a novel CAPTCHA, they're as good as bulletproof as far as the spammers are concerned. They could write a bot capable of beating it, but why bother? Of course if lots of sites started using it, or a big player like Google, it would become worth doing.
In other words the chess puzzle itself isn't really that good, but since no one else is using it, no bot in the wild will have the faintest clue how to deal with it.
That's clever. No machine could ever crack a chess puzzle better than a human. Sarah Connor 1, Skynet 0...
I think all chatrooms should have an KOL Altar of Literacy style captchas:-
When they get [there|their|they're], [there|their|they're] going to put on [there|their|they're] mittens.
[Your|You're] nuts if you think I'm going to polish [your|you're] armor for free.
HippyFreetard, don’t forget “[to|too|two]”, “[ewe|yew|you]”, and “[for|fore|four]”. You could also expand “[your|you’re]” to “[ewer|yore|your|you’re]”. (Personally, I’d split them into “[ewer|you’re]” and “[yore|your]” as appropriate, but of course pronunciation varies by dialect.)
Just for laughs, throw in “[armor|armour]” as a trick question.
"When they get [there|their|they're], [there|their|they're] going to put on [there|their|they're] mittens.
[Your|You're] nuts if you think I'm going to polish [your|you're] armor for free."
With education standards going down as they are... I think that test would beat most university graduates. Not that that would be a bad thing.
I help run a specialist forum. CAPTCHAs weren't stopping the spammer, neither were the questions such as "Which of these is not a colour? Blue, red, or car". As soon as we switched the questions to being basic things about the specialist subject, we got rid of 99% of potential spammers. You have to put a contact address in there too, because there is always the odd person who wants to join but knows little about the subject yet.