Comment by bjonathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjonathan | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, I just connected to your website and the first "bafflebot" submit to me is "what is this character's name" (a yellow bird) I'm from France, I dont know all the US kid cartoons so I cant answer to that captcha.. Whereas 1+2 or "enter the word" is pretty universal.

Second try, I have in front of me a red apple with legs and arms and the question is "what is it?" The question is wayyyyy to broad, what should I answer? is it another cartoon that I'm not aware of? is it an apple? a red apple?...

A captcha must be VERY simple and universal.

I read a few months ago a good captcha idea, a picture of a human and the challenge is to say if it's a man or a female. A bot cant read the picture well enough, but the human eye/brain is trained to identify a man or a female in less than a second!

My 2cents, good luck with your project. I agree captcha generally sucks

Male vs female is a poor test because you can guess correctly about 50% of the time. Thats on par with some current CAPTCHA bots.

You could show several faces and ask "how many are male/female?"

Another idea along these lines would be to present a scene and ask the user how many objects are in the scene. It's a very difficult problem for computers to descern individual objects in a scene, especially if they overlap.

It's also not so good for the visually impaired because you can't really provide an audio version of the challenge, whereas identifying the letters in a random string is easier to present as audio.

That's true. Maybe you could do something with profiles from FB. Show a small collections of faces one of which is your friend on FB. Then you have to select your friend. For the visually impaired you could read peoples' names.

A real person would instantly recognize one of their friends and even the guy getting paid to solve captchas would have a hard time.

Of course, you then have the problem of getting someone to connect FB to the CAPTCHA service for the first time instead of abandoning the form.

Do captcha bots ever use the audio string? Could you not hook up a voice recognizer to the audio portion?

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