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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

#291

Post by thaumasiotes »

brookst wrote: post #257
jkubicek wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK sure, but back when old heads were complaining about the kids not knowing assembly, those same kids knew C or Fortran or something. In 2026, if you call yourself a developer and can't solve FizzBuzz without help, it's hard to argue that you know anything useful at all.

Do modern languages and compilers count as “help”? Because I could probably do fizzbuzz in x86 assembly, but it would take a while to page that back in, and I suspect most people who call themselves developers today simply could not do it without help.

> I could probably do fizzbuzz in x86 assembly

How? Fizzbuzz requires you to produce output; that's not functionality that CPU instructions provide.

You can call into existing functionality that handles it for you, but at that point what are you objecting to about the 'modern language'?

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#292

Post by allan_s »

skulk wrote: post #213
jaybrendansmith wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

> computers do not help human education in the slightest I had no access to anyone who could teach me calculus as a kid except Khan Academy, so I think this is a gross exaggeration. But I agree in the end, that all my "real" learning did come from pen-and-paper practice, not watching videos.

I think what the author meant is that it does help not more than the same knowledge provided the old way.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#293

Post by swiftcoder »

utopiah wrote: post #220
swiftcoder wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way this actually works is if you move CTF to in-person only. There's no other way to reasonably prevent the whole leaderboard being taken up by whoever spent the most on tokens.

Sure, I don't know how to make it work. I just know that DeepBlue didn't kill competitive chess. We simply have at least 3 different rule sets, namely - no computer assistance, which does also mean no mobile on competition, human only - advanced chess with assistance - computer only, no human assistance and arguably chess itself is not doing worst since.

I think the big difference here, is that organisers of chess tournaments don’t have to design multiple entirely new board games for each competition. When AI can one-shot CTF challenges, you have to develop new challenges in secret for every competition, and they are single-use.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#294

Post by krapht »

eudamoniac wrote: post #240
IanCal wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fizzbuzz is such an incredibly simple problem if you can’t do it I struggle to see how you’d be able to complete any task that requires very basic reasoning and very basic coding knowledge. And if an AI system can do those parts, what am I getting for spending tens of thousands of pounds per year by hiring a person who can’t? Wouldn’t I just tag codex on the tickets? I’m not talking about gotcha level stuff here wher…

I feel the same way about inverting a binary tree, but a lot of people act like it's an arduous request. I am guessing it's because they've never read the description of what inverting a binary tree is, but maybe people are just that bad at recursion.

You can go your entire career without recursing, or using a tree data structure in its raw form (i.e. you only use it as part of a library)

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#295

Post by tpm »

brookst wrote: post #206
raincole wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "the next generation is ruined" is always a popular sentiment. It has been with us for at least two thousand years, and it surely won't go away in our lifetime. When this AI era's devs grow older they'll complain the newer generation can't even vide code too.

I remember when everyone bemoaned the kids not knowing assembly language. How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly? “Kids these days don’t work as hard / know as much / value the important things” is as tired as it is universal.

> How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly?

I'm genuinely curious how someone who never wrote a program in assembly, or debugged a program machine instruction by machine instruction, can really understand how software works. My working hypothesis is most of them don't and actually it's fine because they don't need it.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#296

Post by Nifty3929 »

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea.

Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the concept well. I recall one corporate training I was sitting through and they used the term "Border Gateway Protocol" and it took me a half beat to think through "oh, you mean BGP?"

Thanks!

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#297

Post by bawolff »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #296

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea. Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the con…

Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for.

More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation. When you are just listening in you don't get the full context sometimes.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#298

Post by Karrot_Kream »

walletdrainer wrote: post #39
lukan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I had to google what CTF means (capture the flag, a hacking competition), so surely cannot judge here, but the text indicates that with AI some things are very different today: "That makes open CTFs pay-to-win. The more tokens you can throw at a competition, the faster you can burn down the board. Specialised cybersecurity models like alias1 by Alias Robotics are becoming less relevant compared to general front…

There are two different schools of thought: 1) It’s OK to do just about anything to win a CTF, including installing malware on the organisers computers months before the actual event so you’ll have an easy time stealing the flags. 2) It’s not ok to try and win the CTF with a solution the authors did not intend. Recently the #2 crowd has been winning because the hacking scene has turned corporate and boring. People st…

Yeah I remember running a few CTFs in school and was always scared (in a good way) about what the players would do to the game's servers. For this reason we also only ran the CTF on the school's network and IT even floated running in an isolated VLAN.

The fact that CTFs became a sort of SAT score for getting a security job made me lose interest very early on.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#299

Post by bentaber »

selimthegrim wrote: post #280
whichdan wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree. I grew up in a very blue-collar town, and anything I wanted to learn (outside of public schooling) either came from emaciated websites or whatever books I could find at the library. Having YouTube and Khan Academy and everything else would have made such a huge difference for me.

Now I’m wondering how a website is emaciated

Not enough bytes?

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#300

Post by [deleted] »

bawolff wrote: post #297
Nifty3929 wrote: post #296

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea. Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the con…

Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for. More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on…

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