Show HN: The Captcha Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Captcha Experiment

thecaptchaexperiment.com

15 pointsabrichr16 comments

The one that said something about "type the red moving characters" never worked for me. The spinner just sat there for > 30 seconds before I gave up.

(Chrome on OS X with Flash installed, if that makes a difference)

The very first one I got was:

   Chair is to wall: like 'd00r' is to "mAn" and the An$wer is; bedroom.

I was so flabbergasted I didn't even know where to start, and I had to move on just to see what else was in there---the rest of the captchas all seem pretty mundane.

Edit: found it again, fixed it to be direct quote. I'm looking at it again now and I still have no idea what I'm supposed to do with that.

Without input validation, and without any clear motivation as top why this experiment was important, I was perfectly happy entering garbage or blank forms.

What I'm getting at is that without any real motivation for submitting a form, I don't really care what I enter. This is different than when I enter a captcha "in the wild" - in that case I would try really hard because I care about successfully submitting the form.

I'm not sure what this experiment is trying to prove, but without that motivation, I don't believe it's a proper simulation of real captcha use.

That's a good point. We'll have to think about how to address that.

coughgamificationcough

Just kidding. You could always do a drawing. Ask for a donated ipad. everyone who answers 100 or more catchpas correctly are eligible to be in the raffle.

cynical-me wonders who's signup process they're "crowdsourcing"...

Damn, that would've been a pretty good business model. As it is, we're doing nothing like that.

"How many years in the Hundred Years War"

This was my favourite one. Easy to solve -- not at all trivial to parse mechanically.

Really? I don't know how many people who would know that the correct answer is actually 116.

heh. I really thought it was 100 (and so does the site because it said I was correct).

maybe something like, "How many birthdays has a fourteen year old has?"

Or: how many inches of sandwich do you get if you get a half-foot long?

The recaptcha didn't have any instructions, and seemed to supply a lot of numbers and words. Were you supposed to give a particular one?

I had little difficulty with the others, but the lack of instructions might bias the results against recaptcha.

We've simply implemented the recaptcha code as it was given. The goal is to evaluate how well it would do were it used in the wild, so we don't provide any extra instructions.

to be fair, I think that may be part of what they are evaluating: existing captcha systems compared to some others. So the lack of instructions from recaptcha is a flaw in recaptcha, not the survey

I got about 4 questions in and then it started giving me basic authentication boxes saying the site is password protected, and I couldn't do anything or click any links on the site without logging in or something.

Sorry about that; I'm a developer, not a system administrator. It's fixed now.

I did not get the audio one at all

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