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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant building of software. Less than brilliant copy.

I would change

  Black plays; checkmate in one!
  This is a chess CAPTCHA.
  Click on the board to make your move,
  and prove you are human.

  This is a chess CAPTCHA...
  To prove that you are human,
  click on a black piece, then
  click on the only destination
  square that will checkmate.

I really don't mean to nitpick, but took me a minute to figure out what to do. Sometimes the thing that makes the biggest difference for us programmers is not our communication with our compiler but our communication with our users.

Great job. Thanks to you, I just announced I won't be ready for brunch for another half hour. <Refresh> Sigh.

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Or how about:

    A CAPTCHA appears before you,
    in form of a chessboard to prove,
    that you're a real user,
    and not a computer,
    by checkmating WHITE in one move.

I would change "a real user" with "a real user who doesn’t use a screen-reader". That’s less funny, but more accurate.

Out of curiosity: are there any known blind chess players? I guess it would be quite hardcore.

Not sure about blind, but blindfold chess is a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindfold_chess

Ray Charles.

"Charles played chess using a special board with holes for the pieces and raised squares." [1]

"Are there any blind chess masters in the world? Have there been any throughout history? Yes. Al Sandrin, who died a few years ago, was an USBCA member who was a master." [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Charles

[2] http://www.americanblindchess.org/faq.html

There are blind go players, so I assume blind chess players also exist.

I think blind chess is a lot easier than blind go. Apparently there are master-level blind chess players, while Sensei's Wiki mentions only a 26-kyu blind go player (i.e., around the level of somebody who has been playing for about a month).

There are many blind chess players. Competitive chess rules allow blind players access to special equipment (basically an auxiliary pegged board) so that they can 'feel' the position. Really strong chess players don't actually need sight of the board and I imagine the best blind players (there are many of master strength) don't make extensive use of this provision.

In the biannual international chess 'olympiads' (team competition between countries) a multi country blind players team competes. Some other disabilities are also represented in the same way.

One of my friends spent his 2 years of military service in Israel playing chess -- up to 2 dozen chess games simultaneously, blind folded, against soldiers in the Israeli army. After his army service, he eventually ended up in grad school and later on became a professor. But more than his research papers, it is his chess playing that I remember.

The original copy is better than your proposal: you get to the checkmate point, which is the essence of the captcha, at the very end.

The way it was originally laid out, it's clear that you are looking for checkmate in one, while in your copy it seems acceptable to click any black piece.

I don't see there any need for a change

  Black plays; checkmate in one!

This is the most obvious form for chess players; universally used throughout many chess quiz books.

Uh, if it's a CAPTCHA intended to be usable by those who know chess as opposed to those who actually play chess then yes, they should probably ask for what they actually want instead of saying something that will lead the user to the right assumption.

Of course if it's really "CHESS player CAPTCHA" then I could be way off...

It's on a chess website, so yes, it's for chess players.

Chess players who can see.

Perhaps it was designed in part to keep newbies out.

Black plays; checkmate in one!

What can be more clear than this?

If anything, I'd prefer to have the king I'm supposed to checkmate standing on a red field to make it easier to spot.

Are you supposed to "click-drag" or "click the piece then the cell"? How about on iOS ?

My point is that, while the one-liner captures the idea of the captcha, the summary doesn't explain how to actually execute.

So add a short explanation at the end.

Starting with "Hey, let's solve a CAPTCHA because I'm not sure if you are a human" and burying information which side the user is supposed to play somewhere in the middle of the text would make it a major PITA.

I like the original wording because it is exactly how chess problems are typically introduced. I'm not sure the usefulness of this anywhere beyond a chess - related site, but I agree - - it's absolutely brilliant! I wish I had thought of it.

I would change "human" to "biological entity"...we should not exclude extraterrestrials from the target audience...this is at the risk of offending non-biological (and probably also extra-terrestrial) entities, but they would presumably render all captchas obsolete anyway.

While I think both version of the text would work, I think it's worthwhile to go over some reasons why the suggestion could actually be less clear than the original.

1) The two most important pieces of information (player color and goal) became separated from each other;

2) The third piece of information (number of moves) went missing;

3) The player's color became hidden in the middle of the paragraph instead of the first word;

4) The player's goal disappeared to the end of the paragraph, instead of in the first sentence after player color;

5) The original has a clear and unambiguous goal for both new and regular users, while the alternative became very verbose, especially for returning users.

6) Usability is about the target audience, and the target audience is chess players, not software developers.

7) In contrast to how the founders want to position the brand, a very watered down, a newbie-friendly CAPTCHA could alienate experts from the site, and an expert-friendly CAPTCHA could alienate beginners.

To the OP: Since you have an established chess community, you should be asking them if they have a strong opinion rather than blindly taking advice from Hacker News :)

I will just point out that the first example I was given was a chess CAPTCHA which had two checkmates, so it is not a case of "the only destination square that will checkmate" -- there may be two moves.

No need. Given the demographic targeted, the current text is sufficient (possibly overly wordy at that) and regards the question of how to move, they are used to interfaces far worse than this---they will figure it out. I suppose that you could claim that as part of the puzzle :)

I disagree. Use the clearer set of instructions. Do not leave confusing instructions in place just because the target demographic can decipher them while others are left in confusion.

If we want the captcha to be accessible outside the target demographic, we should scrap the whole chess thing as well.

When writing instructions for users who might see the instructions frequently, putting an introduction like that, especially with the locally-relevant data buried, is not helpful.

Instead, their terse instructions, written in a familiar and easily-parsable format are ideal. Placing a "What is this?" link afterward that opens[1] to more detailed instructions is how you should approach this.

[1] Through whatever mechanism is most appropriate for your audience. I'd suggest a tooltip by default.

BTW, the sentence "Black plays; checkmate in one!" is popular with giving such chess quizzes in various chess books, magazines etc. Probably this is the reason to start with this.

Some of the captures I have noticed more than one solution, perhaps modifying the suggested words even further is required.

My only complaint with the wording is the use of unnecessary technical jargon. Why use the word "captcha" ?

thanks for the feedback, I will apply the suggested change soon.

Please don't! The original is better and gets the point accross faster than the suggested change.

Ignore the feedback. Original copy is better.

It is interesting because you can't really A/B test the response time with the different text, since the response time includes the human processing time of the chess problem.

Sure you can. You're just adding two (probably normal-ish) distibutions: the distribution of human response times for processing the chess move, and the distribution of human response times for parsing the instructions.

Human response times are almost never normally distributed. They can't be, as a matter of fact as negative response time is an impossibility.

In any case, they are typically long tailed and weird looking. Not normal, at least in my experience of working with them

You are right, of course, and I knew I was going to regret the use of even the toned-down term "probably normal-ish". The question is whether the one can meaningfully ask which text is faster to parse, despite the "noise" the comes from the time to actually perform the chess move. I suspect the answer will be 'yes'.

I think the answer will be 'no' as solving a chess problem is a learned skill and not as innate as reading and understanding text and the time delta of comprehension between two similar text passages << time to solve chess problem distributed between users of low and high skill.

Why would the distribution of user skill differ across test groups? There's no reason it should. The expected time to solve the puzzle itself would be the same across both groups.

I would just recommend clarifying "click" to "click on the piece to move and the destination square" or something to that effect.

Are you lichess creator? Just wanted to congratulate you for the great peace of software you got there. IMHO is one of the best multi-player chess platforms out there. It is so straightforward and UX is amazing. The "analyze game" link after the end of the game is also very good.

Even though I am only a ~1200 ELO player, I play almost daily and enjoy your platform a lot :)

"checkmate in one!" seems fairly clear to me.

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