People are playing a new DOOM-themed CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA programs used to determine whether a site visitor is a human or a bot come in very standard formats. Think text distortion (where users type characters they see into a box amid other squiggles); image recognition (you identify, for example, all the squares in the grid that contain an image of a bicycle); And check the checkbox (you click this box that reads: “I am not a robot”).

But Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a front-end-as-a-service product, has just used the company’s technology Artificial intelligence website builder To come up with a new twist on CAPTCHAs, one that invites users to play the classic single-player game DOOM and kill at least three monsters. You can check it out here.

It’s not a Completely original Idea (DOOM as part of a CAPTCHA). But it still tops the charts at Hacker News, whose audience is largely made up of developers He has notesSome complained about the difficulty, another praised the project as “too metal”, and another commented: “There are so many monsters, it took me 3-4 tries… just like a real captcha!”