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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

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Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#71

Post by jofzar »

IanCal wrote: post #65
chrismorgan wrote: post #53

Meta: this was submitted with the article’s title “The CTF scene is dead” which I found very easy to understand. It has just been updated to use the subtitle’s first sentence, “Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format”. I find that much harder to grasp, rather like a garden-path sentence. My immediate thoughts were that “Frontier” was a company name, and that there was some file format named CTF. If you don’t know…

If it helps I understand the second much better and feels less clickbaity and includes more info. I do agree with the points you made about the confusion although I find frontier a term used in this area a lot, “frontier AI models have” would probably resolve that.

Imo frontier is too niche and specific, if you know what a frontier model means then it's fine, but if you don't then it's negative/detrimental to the title.

"new" does the same thing and is probably just a better descriptor then frontier

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#73

Post by vladms »

p-e-w wrote: post #68
mold_aid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs can be wonderful teachers Are they or aren't they

A million times better than any human teacher I’ve ever had, for sure. Now I’m certain that there exist those mythical human instructors who can do better, but that’s not worth much if 99.99% of people don’t have access to them. Just like a good human physician who takes their time with the patient is better than an LLM, but that’s not worth much either given that this doesn’t match most people’s experience with thei…

Did an LLM teach you a topic you did not feel like learning?

For me the best human teachers were the ones that managed to make me interested on topics that I thought are boring/useless (many times my opinion being stupid, mostly due to lack of experience).

So far with LLM I learn about things I know something (at least that they exist) and I am interested in, which is a small subset of things that one should learn during lifetime.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#74

Post by Retr0id »

amingilani wrote: post #22

I don’t think CTFs are dead, they’ll just evolve. The difficulty level will need to be increased or the rules locked down. Just like sports and racing persist despite the existence of performance enhancing drugs and rocket technology. I just did a CTF where I was in the top 10. It was the first CTF I completed and I used AI because the rules permitted it. That said, I couldn’t solve all challenges. But yes, it was si…

That doesn't work. The thing that made CTFs fun is the fact that the challenges are solvable in a short-ish timeframe, usually a day at most, if you have the requisite skills and talent.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#76

Post by dguest »

entropyneur wrote: post #67
daymanstep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful teachers that give unreliable information with total confidence?

I had human teachers who did that in middle/high school. Took me many years to pick out all the hallucinated bits of "knowledge". I don't think the current models are any less reliable that what we currently have on average.

I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point.

But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teaching, like flying a plane or driving a train, might become more about keeping watch over a small group of people and ensuring that things don't go off the rails, and that's fine.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#77

Post by magic_hamster »

baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

Education is also figured out. You just need to learn, do and practice for yourself. Telling the agent "to just do it for you" is tempting, but it's not learning. You need to be deliberate when you're trying to actually learn and internalize.

Also, you could spin up your own educational agent with very strict instructions on guiding the user instead of just doing the work. Of course you can always go around it but if you're making an effort to learn, this is a good middle ground.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#78

Post by Retr0id »

walletdrainer wrote: post #2

>I started playing CTFs in 2021 >and the old game is not coming back For many people the CTF scene was already dead in 2021 because it had turned into something unrecognisable. In reality it’s just different.

I started playing in 2015 or so and had mostly stopped by 2020. Not because I felt it was "dead" exactly but it just wasn't hitting the same for me. By then it wasn't "the winner has the most LLMs", but "the winner has the most members on their team". I merged into one of the mega-teams and it just wasn't fun any more.
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