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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

#161

Post by mr_mitm »

zem wrote: post #116
3form wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one feels less sinister than some other things at least to me, personally. You can reasonably doubt that the conservation of mass is violated and find out the truth based on that. But understanding more complex biology or historical context for some things? Granted, many of these things seem to be low stakes, but I'm sure there are some there are not (sex ed comes to mind).

to be fair, fusion does violate conservation of mass, just not the way the teacher explained it. the loss of mass is where the energy comes from.

Yes, there is no law of conservation for mass like there is for energy. Fusion is a good example for why it's not conserved. The teacher was right.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#162

Post by salt4034 »

SoylentOrange wrote: post #45

Great article, well written, and good analogy to chess. I’ve been playing competitive chess most of my adult life and I think that the solution lies in how chess dealt with this problem: Explicit ELO measurements with some cheating detection. AI assistance wholly banned. As you climb the ELO ladder, detection gets more onerous. At top level during online events, anti cheating teams require the use of both monitoring…

Yes, chess has been dealing with AI for decades at this point, and it's amusing/frustrating that so many other communities are deciding to re-discover everything from scratch, rather than just learn from the chess experience.

If CTF is a player-vs-player event, then AI should just be banned outright, otherwise it will devolve into AI-vs-AI, which is just not an interesting competition format, as we learned in chess. Compared to FIDE top events (which bans AI), only a tiny niche audience actually watches the Top Chess Engine Championship (AI-centered). It turns out what we care about is not whether chess can be solved by any means available, but what are the limits of the human mind in learning chess.

Pretty much all chess coaches/educators also warn against relying heavily on AI during learning; engines only give you an illusion of understanding.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#163

Post by skinfaxi »

dandellion wrote: post #152
jsoaoxhd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people always hijack threads to discuss titles? Most articles have terrible titles. Just downvote it and move on.

Why do you contribute to making this thread longer? Just downvote an move on.

They can't downvote.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#165

Post by josh2600 »

IanCal wrote: post #105
Gigachad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai?

If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not?

Genuinely curious.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#166

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

The best frontier LLMs can't solve 4th grade math homework yet. Don't hold your breath on that collapse of education.

(Real mathematics problems, not American-style ""math"".)

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#167

Post by lachiflippi »

The "CTF for fun" aspect has been dead ever since the winning teams had thousands of dollars of rewards waiting for them. Of course people are going to use anything that's not explicitly forbidden by the rules to win. Introducing what amounts to an "I win" button that both can't be prevented by rules and is accessible to anyone didn't "break the format" anymore than the epidemic of giant merger teams did a couple years ago, it just broke the community because you now don't have to actually talk to other people to cheat anymore.

Many CTFs have switched to a dual-leaderboard format recently, one for "agentic teams," one for the rest. If all you care about is "learning" and imaginary internet points, you can just participate as a human team and adblock the AI scoreboard, and maybe lobby CTFTime into splitting their rankings as well.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#169

Post by xfax »

josh2600 wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

To understand the code they are shipping requires some level of proficiency. Their inability to do fizzbuzz without AI calls that into question.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#170

Post by jadar »

josh2600 wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

It’s about deeply understanding what you’re doing. Like as a kid before you knew how to ride a bike, you could sit on a bike and peddling, but until it “clicked” you couldn’t balance and keep going forward stable. Fizzbuzz tests your ability to reason through a problem that seems simple on its face, but is easy to get wrong and/or overthink.
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