Cute but like a lot of captchas misguided at this stage

The problem they try to solve is real, but I don't think that 'hacking minigames' are the correct direction to be looking to solve this, and ultimately end up making mandatory human identity verification seem more palatable as the less annoying option

games and challenges like this are more annoying / resource consuming to humans (i.e., time, patience), and can imagine it ends up excluding humans who cannot complete the challenge due to extenuating circumstances, like i have no idea if someone who uses sight assistance accessibility tooling can complete this challenge reasonably, and if this style of challenge takes off I am pretty sure the challenges will continue to exclude many humans who use accessibility tools

I worry this approach ends up being the next cookie banners (which were always malicious compliance in the saltiest, pettiest way)

anubis-style cycle burning approaches seem to be best, but have not looked for research on the efficacy of this approach. if it does have a positive impact for operators though, a method like that seems better

edit: to be clear, I do not want mandatory identity verification -- not at all it's awful, and my fear is that tools like this will only serve to make that option seem more palatable in comparison

Is there reason to believe this is a good discriminator of human vs AI? I didn't see any about page, or statistic, or anything like that, but maybe I'm just missing it?

edit: The page links to [1], but [1] has none of the information I'm really looking for -- why should somebody use this tool?

[1] https://github.com/mortspace/playcaptcha

It's nothing like a claw machine. It picked up the toys twice in two tries.

A human would be incredibly suspicious of this.

Claude Opus 4.8 one-shotted it... I think we should gear these systems towards making the cost of abuse expensive as they will be able to get around these things more and more easily.

I can prove I'm human by losing a claw machine.

The thing to grab is always on the front layer. Seems like an AI could be pretty easily trained to defeat this.

Also when you move the claw left and right, it "leans" in the wrong direction.

The most important part that most commenters did not read:

"And to be clear: it checks that someone is playing, not who they are. Keep your real checks behind it."

It's just a game, not a CAPTCHA.

Lichess has a checkmate captcha that I think is cute.

It requires you to solve a mate-in-one puzzle to, e.g., post on the forums.

(Sorry, don't have a better link, there wasn't any non-technical I could find about it).

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/q19wgq/til_lichess_d...

Just stop this insanity already. The amount of "anti-bot" challenges actual humans fail to pass is getting ridiculous. For small commercial entities, you could say them shooting themselves in the foot is probably them getting what they deserve as a result of them not reigning in vigilante sysadmins, but when it is also happening on actual official government sites, this is where the line has been crossed.

Thanks to this game, I was able to change my identity from a slightly less fallen human into a machine. Thank you

Codex with Browser Use (Codex 5.3 Spark) was able to solve this with a simple prompt

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0b80b07b-d88f-414...

I don't know what a next generation CAPTCHA should look like, but I know anything game-shaped will be a trivial target for RLVR. That's like trying to beat Stockfish. That ship has sailed.

I am a human and have never won anything at a claw machine.

I'm tired of constantly having to prove I'm a human. Especially if it's trying to be lighthearted and fun on the surface, it just reminds me how Internet has fallen.

Really fun idea and well done, but this would get annoying very quickly.

>npm install playcaptcha

Imagine you get pwned for trying this out in your home project and the APT escalates to your company repos and infects your company assets, and then the post mortem comes in and you have to explain this is what infected the company it stack

Much better than Google’s 'find objects in pictures'!

lol this is actually fun. in this era of ai, knowing who's real human and who's ai is so underrated

Cute but… Will there ever be a day when we don't have to prove that we're human?

No human needs to prove they are, online or elsewhere. Online, be it human or bot, the issue is not the ontological class of the direct actor, it's the goal of the people who launch the browsing. When the intention is malevolent, the situation is not better just because the campaign would involve real humans working in inhuman conditions.

I really like this! Also the other things you can find on the website. Cool stuff! Makes me want to get better at Frontend shenanigans.

I wish all captchas were like this. A lot more fun!

i d rather play 1-1

What makes me human?

If it is DNA then why would I need a claw machine? (Note that this defnition on DNA, which in itself is mega-odd since DNA differs, would mean that via synthetic biology one could yield humans - according to such a definition. But this does not have to be correct, so the definition would be flawed.)

If it is not DNA, how else to prove it?

Time and time again, I prove that I'm human by giving this crap the finger and then visiting some other site. It's calling out a false positive and then exercising good taste.