Prove you're human by winning a claw machine
69 points
2 days ago
| 23 comments
| feralui.vercel.app
| HN
csydas
2 hours ago
[-]
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

reply
jhartikainen
2 hours ago
[-]
I think this purely as an idea is pretty fun, and there is value in that. But beyond the initial impressions it's exactly as you say. It's not different at all from others in how it will get annoying over time.

Accessibility is a big concern with all kinds of CAPTCHAs it seems. Even without any disabilities, I've seen some that I cannot solve because it's illegible.

reply
pinkmuffinere
5 hours ago
[-]
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

reply
Shank
4 hours ago
[-]
Of course not. It is clearly a fun toy.
reply
stavros
3 hours ago
[-]
Congratulations! You have proven you are human by complaining about the test instead of solving it. Redirecting you now...
reply
BLKNSLVR
5 hours ago
[-]
It's nothing like a claw machine. It picked up the toys twice in two tries.

A human would be incredibly suspicious of this.

reply
hurtigioll
5 hours ago
[-]
the real CAPTCHA would be having a "this is not realistic" button that only humans would press
reply
numpad0
3 hours ago
[-]
Yeah, real claw machines straight up have tunable win probability controls(subject to local gambling laws).

but this is fun!

reply
marssaxman
4 hours ago
[-]
My exact thought: this is nothing like a real claw machine.
reply
brtkwr
4 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
arbol
3 hours ago
[-]
It's just a concept, not a real test.

Captcha are already expensive at scale due to escalating checks when abuse is detected. You have to orchestrate and pay for residential proxies, containers with different fingerprints, different behavioural data, clean IP rep, emulate device performance to avoid revealing youre running on a server... A 1-shot doesn't scale against this.

reply
rossvc
3 hours ago
[-]
If the payoff is worth it, no captcha is too expensive.
reply
CapsAdmin
1 hour ago
[-]
unless it has video input, i wonder if something based on animation and timing would work, as screenshots wouldn't clearly capture motion and response time would be too slow as well
reply
ikari_pl
4 hours ago
[-]
So, a paywall is the simple solution
reply
groestl
3 hours ago
[-]
I can prove I'm human by losing a claw machine.
reply
SweetSoftPillow
3 hours ago
[-]
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.

reply
rendaw
2 hours ago
[-]
Both the submission title and the first sentence are: Prove you’re human by winning a claw machine.
reply
lemagedurage
1 hour ago
[-]
They should make it more clear that it's a concept.

I could see a real version that sends the inputs to the backend where some analysis is done, but right now an adversary can just run the onVerify callback as "bypass".

reply
bschwindHN
5 hours ago
[-]
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.

reply
eks391
5 hours ago
[-]
Yup. I could guess what needs to be grabbed without reading the prompt because it was always the front-most object. It also has the largest grab area; some of the plushies can't even be grabbed.

Fun idea though

reply
ozim
3 hours ago
[-]
You don’t need to train it just ask current state of model.
reply
m00dy
5 hours ago
[-]
I can bypass this captcha just by using gemma4
reply
latexr
2 hours ago
[-]
Not only on the front layer, but mostly in the centre too. I just tested it a bunch of times and the overwhelming majority it worked without even moving the claw, it was just grab and release.
reply
mcyc
5 hours ago
[-]
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...

reply
tjoff
4 hours ago
[-]
Because computers turned out to be so bad at chess? :)
reply
jaggederest
4 hours ago
[-]
Reverse captcha: only robots can reprove one of the Euler problems on the fly? Statistically speaking we can round the people who can into the outlier group, right?
reply
sshine
1 hour ago
[-]
That's actually interesting:

Like when games detect aimbots, they don't ban people, but put them in an aimbot bracket, so everyone you play with is a cheater.

Provide a captcha that is essentially harder for a human to solve, but trivial for either a human or an AI, and transparently separate them into two communities.

reply
PeterStuer
3 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
maxbond
3 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
teekert
1 hour ago
[-]
I am a human and have never won anything at a claw machine.
reply
pjc50
1 hour ago
[-]
They're rigged.
reply
mohsen1
4 hours ago
[-]
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...

reply
jdw64
3 hours ago
[-]
Thanks to this game, I was able to change my identity from a slightly less fallen human into a machine. Thank you
reply
codelong888
3 hours ago
[-]
lol this is actually fun. in this era of ai, knowing who's real human and who's ai is so underrated
reply
clark1013
3 hours ago
[-]
Much better than Google’s 'find objects in pictures'!
reply
TZubiri
5 hours ago
[-]
>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

reply
Terr_
4 hours ago
[-]
> npm install

Coworkers on project: "Containers? Not running things as root? Hah, you're overengineering things: Just follow the readme where it says to install the daemons and run all code and plugins on your dev-box. It works fine, then we can show how we're using AI!"

(Yeah, not as good as completely separate computer, diminishing returns, but still...)

reply
thunderbong
3 hours ago
[-]
If you see the code, that dependency just happens to be another file in the repository [0]

The only dependency is the 'motion' library.

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

reply
TZubiri
1 hour ago
[-]
does npm install pull code from that github repo, though? If not, auditing that repo is a huge blunder.

I'm seeing this from npm, which is a bit different:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/playcaptcha

Not saying the package is malicious, (although it might be, but it's a more likely threat that the devs themselves become infected by a supply chain worm and spread it downstream.) just saying, if you are going to audit it, actually audit it as if you were up against an attacker.

reply
GuestFAUniverse
5 hours ago
[-]
npm install randomgotcha
reply
spaqin
4 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
nomel
4 hours ago
[-]
> it just reminds me how Internet has fallen.

phpboard added captchas back in 2004.

reply
vasco
4 hours ago
[-]
I prove I'm a human by giving up trying to use the website. A machine would just relentlessly keep trying. You should try it.
reply
psychoslave
3 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
nicman23
3 hours ago
[-]
i d rather play 1-1
reply
sevenzero
4 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply
Mistletoe
5 hours ago
[-]
I wish all captchas were like this. A lot more fun!
reply
shevy-java
5 hours ago
[-]
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?

reply
latexr
3 hours ago
[-]
A CAPTCHA is not concerned with your biology or philosophy, only with if you’re an automated request.
reply
doctor_radium
5 hours ago
[-]
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.
reply