If you find Captchas obnoxious and difficult to solve at times, they’re about to become much more fun. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch has developed a Captcha that requires the user to kill at least three enemies in Doom. It might not be as easy as you think though, because the game’s running on nightmare mode.
The game is complete with a small level, ammo and weapon pickups, and even has mobile support. Remember that nightmare mode is the hardest difficulty on Doom, and if you haven’t played the game before, you’ll need a couple of tries. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s surprisingly enjoyable. I play FPS games daily, but the old muscle memory took a few tries to kick into action.
You can try out the Captcha for yourself.
The internet is riddled with outrageously difficult-to-solve Captchas or Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart — a quick authentication method to ensure a visitor to a website is a human and not a bot. However, with the AI race on the rise, Captcah’s days are numbered as bots written to beat these tests are becoming increasingly more accurate and quick than humans.
Using Doom as a bot prevention tool is a pretty good idea at the moment, given just how bad GPT-4 is at playing the game, but given enough training, most AI models will easily be able to conquer the game. Additionally, while the Doom game engine is open source, the maps, textures, sprites, and other in-game elements aren’t. Rauch’s implementation looks quite like the original, meaning id Software could take legal action if the project is implemented on a large scale.
That said, given how most basic Captchas make users roll their eyes, I wouldn’t be too concerned about the Doom Captcha becoming commonplace. This is more of a tech demo for V0, Vercel’s AI-based web development tool announced in 2023, which generates entire web projects from natural language prompts. Rauch’s workflow for creating the Captcha is available for everyone to examine.
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