In brief: Being faced with a CAPTCHA is about as welcome as opening a Christmas present and finding it's a Humane Ai Pin. But a new variant offers a little more fun than clicking on boxes of specific items, though it's about 10 times more difficult: kill three demons on a secret level of Doom.
Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart have been frustrating internet users for years. Preventing the likes of account-creating bots, spam, data-scaping, etc., is important, but it's hard to remember that fact when squinting at a squiggled word on the screen, or faced with the dilemma of whether that tiny bit of bicycle handle peeking into a square means you should select it.
There are fewer anger-inducing CAPTCHAs these days, such as dragging items to locations and listening to audio clips – we also saw a Doom minigame in 2021. Now, there's a new CAPTCHA version of the iconic FPS, which you can try out here. The idea is to kill at least three demons. Good luck with that – it took me a lot of attempts before I managed it.
As reported by TechCrunch, the latest Doom CAPTCHA is the work of Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product. He used his company's AI site builder to create the program.
While it's a fun twist on classic CAPTCHAs, it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that people have been complaining about the Doom variant's difficulty.
The reason why it's so hard is explained by commenter smitelli on Hacker News: this is actually the secret E1M9: Military Base level that players would normally encounter after E1M3. By this point in the game, you would have a shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, and probably some armor. So, starting with just a pistol and no protection means this is going to be a challenge, especially as the difficulty level is set to Nightmare.
There are also questions over just how well this program will work as a CAPTCHA, given that AI bots can be trained to play games like Doom. Still, it's better than clicking on traffic lights.
