"Captcha" Your Interest

Opening Captcha Message
Color Differentiation Captcha
Success Check
Word Check
BoXOR Check
Failure
BoXOR Puzzle Success
Failed BoXOR
Robot Identification

Inspiration

We started with the idea of Cybersecurity, wondering what new ideas we had to bring to the table with our skills. Knowing that the forefront of our experience was working in terminals, we figured "Well, what if we did something that requires user input that was related to Cybersecurity?" Thus, the idea of working with Captchas was born! We figured this world could use a better, more interesting way to prove you're not a robot, so that's exactly what we did.

What it does

This program runs you through a series of puzzles - ones specifically designed to be not too challenging for a human - just a fun brain teaser, but difficult for a robot, letting us isolate a computer's answers from a human's. These will leave humans with a fun little challenge, and computers with a gauntlet of human-designed puzzles to lose themselves in. Captchas, made fun!

How we built it

To build puzzles, you've got to come up with them first, so our team of four split up our duties accordingly - divide and conquer! Three people were tasked with racking their brains for concepts that could be a fun puzzle, while one created the framework to tie them all together.

Challenges we ran into

This project pushed us outside our comfort zone, tasking the team with implementing concepts we didn't understand at first. But through the magic of teamwork and THE POWER OF THE INTERNET, we pushed all the knowledge we needed into our brains to turn our ideas into reality. Combine this with the challenge of coming up with a puzzle that doesn't take too much time, but doesn't get old quickly, and you end up with a bunch of problems to solve!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With regards to coming up with the ideas in the first place, we struggled to find answers. It's a fine line between a puzzle that requires a lot of focus and a puzzle that is easy enough to be trivial and boring, so finding a puzzle that fits that criteria was challenging, and required much brainstorming and bouncing of ideas off each other at meals, but we got there in the end! Finding those ideas is something we're all proud of, but the most joy came from the surprising level of cooperation we all had. This hackathon went smoothly, largely due to our ability to work together!

What we learned

This hackathon exposed all of us to new avenues of computing - scouring the internet, we found and committed to memory (pun intended) all kinds of info about color changing terminals, auto-input commands, and a lot of GitHub learning. Unsurprisingly, we also did our research on Captchas, and after everything we've learned, we put it all together to create a pleasant experience with Captchas - something we could all use, to say the least.

What's next for "Captcha" Your Interest

With how much creativity there is out there in the world, the idea of fun Captchas is an idea that we really hope catches on, because current Captchas feel less like puzzles to catch robots and much, MUCH more like wastes of time. The opportunities of this concept are endless - information gathering is absolutely still a possibility, but the reality is this - people right now don't like Captchas, which endangers these all-important gateways to server security. Making them more pleasant encourages the acceptance of Captchas as less of a waste of time, and more of a fun little puzzle game amidst surfing the web. We hope that's what users take away from our submission - cybersecurity is a serious topic, but making it fun is important too!