Doom Captcha (2021)

For very modest definitions of playing. Perhaps it'd be more impressive if they recorded a demo file and let that play back without the realtime overhead? Even so it can only move in forward, back, turn, and fire. And only knows to face away from the wall it's collided with. This is so far below even basic Doom bots that I'd be afraid to call it playing.

The ASCII intermediate interpretation also seems unnecessary and very limiting. But perhaps that's to keep it near realtime, looks like 1 FPS?

And why run on a Mac? Why not a beefy PC with a GPU that can do the calculations faster?

Still, does seem like a fun challenge. Maybe with further tuning or training it can level up

Reminded me of "Growing Living Rat Neurons To Play... DOOM?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw

any models fine tuned for playing an open src game that is non-GPL so that it can be deployed to the app store for interesting bot play ideas?

How could this possibly be in the training set?

Funny. I made a captcha challenge of calculus problems for a comment section on my personal blog page. But 5 years after college, I couldn't remember how to even do them myself so I changed it :-/

You don't actually need much, for a form I used to get spam in I just added a "write 42 here" so anyone who actually cares to read would be able to fill it. spam fell to 0.

(for a site with a slightly higher profile this wouldn't be enough, but for a minor corner of the internet with no ill intent actually aimed at it that turned out to be enough to block the fuzzing "fill all the forms" spam)

The question I got was surprisingly simple: it asked to find "the least real root of the polynomial p(x) = (x+5)(x-4)(x+1)". A determined attacker can quickly hack together something with Tesseract and feed it into even GPT-3.5 to get the correct answer to questions like these.

I guess that means the captcha is doing its job, since running LLMs isn't very cheap or scalable. But any harder problem means you start filtering a significant chunk of human users. Based on the other replies to your comment, it seems that the questions at their current difficulty already stop a lot of human users, yet allow a determined attacker with the setup I described pass through easily.

I remember an old (and now defunct) fan site who hit you with lore questions as a captcha. Though I'd guess a LLM could answer

Can I play by an audio call if I'm visually impared?

The first one I got was 7 * 7 + (-3). That’s trivial, elementary-school-level math, and did they really need LaTeX to render that?

Then I refreshed the page, and was hit with calculus involving trig functions.

Or the one on esolangs.org where you need to evaluate some random Befunge code.

after reloading a dozen times i finally got one that i could solve:

-3 * 3 + (-3) = ?

I got "find the last real zero of the polynomial..." but what does last mean? Largest? Last as the polynomial's factors are given? Something else?

Edit: oh wait. It's "least". I really have no idea then :)

Funny enough, when I've tried to introduce (indoctrinate) friends to DOOM, "how do I aim up" has consistently been the biggest hangup.

This makes sense when I try to indoctrinate my teenager who grew up on Halo and Call of Duty. But I began noticing this hangup in the late 90s with friends my own age.

Here's the real Doom player!

"Finish UV Hangar in < 13 seconds."

Easily achievable[0], thoroughly obnoxious[1]. Just like all captchas.

[0] God help you if you're on a touchscreen. [1] For most people. Especially after the novelty wears off.

Doom is still under copyright protection last I knew. The source is GPL, but have the assets ever been liberally licensed? I think they're more abandonware.

I'm sure you could still do it, but personally I try to respect copyright strictly for any projects I'm going to share. It just feels annoying to have copyright nonsense hanging over me otherwise.