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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

#311

Post by MobiusHorizons »

doublescoop wrote: post #307
bawolff wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Best practice in writing about technical concepts is to spell out acronyms like this on their first use. There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before. It doesn't help that the linked article never bothers to explain this either.

Does spelling it out help? From memory, it is a security competition where participants compete to gain certain objectives. I think capture the flag may explain how scoring is kept, but it wouldn’t help me find out what it is, given that capture the flag is also just the name of a game people play outside by running, or in laser tag or in certain video games.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#313

Post by rightbyte »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #291
brookst wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

You'd just call printf from assembly by knowing the ABI by heart.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#314

Post by archi42 »

nektro wrote: post #308

easy, CTFs should ban it. then it'd be more like the chess community

The article addresses this:

> Rules that ask people not to use LLMs are ignored and almost impossible to enforce in open online events.

It's quite sad to see CTFs dying. I never had the time do seriously participate in CTFs, but I always respected those who did, as well as the people organizing these events.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#315

Post by Gigachad »

arthens wrote: post #243
Gigachad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that is for sure new is the AI interview cheating tools which listen in on the call and provide answers in an overlay invisible to screen sharing. The only way to deal with it would either be invasive spyware on the applicants computer or asking them to do the interview face to face.

A relatively low tech solution could be to give them 2 separate conferencing links, ask them to join each one from a different device, and have the secondary device point the camera and the screen of the primary device.

Easier to just get them to come in. Which also has the effect of filtering out people pretending to be in the country but aren’t.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#316

Post by marshray »

krapht wrote: post #294
eudamoniac wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Right. For the first many decades of computing, recursion was just always the wrong answer for a production software system. (Feel free to provide a counter-example, but please begin with an explanation of how the size of a call stack frame is determined and how exceeding the base allocation is handled on this platform).

So what tree-traversal/quicksort problems tend to measure is how long it's been since you last did CS class homework problems.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#317

Post by s3p »

Don't hate me, I do agree with the premise of the article (I really do!) but I can’t help but notice:

>The issue was never that AI could help. proceeds to write the next 3 sentences about how the problem IS in fact ai help

>Teams that refused to use AI were not just missing a convenience; they were playing a slower version of the competition.

>CTFs were not just a set of puzzles. They were a ladder.

>The claim is not that every challenge is solved. The claim is that...

>The loss is not just a scoreboard. It is the ladder from

Guys I'm so sorry I just can't stop noticing stuff like this. Anyone else?

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#318

Post by worble »

graceful6800 wrote: post #309
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…

Since this is the top comment at the moment: CTF stands for Capture The Flag. Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug

CTF is a game mode for popular online games like halo (or at least, that's how I know it), so paragraphs like

> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.

Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#319

Post by brookst »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #291
brookst wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

Well I could certainly assemble the string buffer. And if I can run dosbox, I can output to the screen buffer at 0xB800.

I’m not objecting to modern languages, I’m just saying that using them fails the “can write fizzbuzz with no help” test to only a slightly lesser degree than using AI tools. They’re a complex compile- and runtime environment that most developers don’t truly understand.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#320

Post by Gigachad »

mannanj wrote: post #227
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.

I first did fizz buzz about 10 years ago fresh out of college. Now, after 10 years in full stack and fully vibe coding, I forgot basic python syntax. An interview like yours would have false positives if you are checking for syntax because well, its like looking up spelling, I just ask the AI for the syntax inline.

You would not have been a good fit for this position in that case.
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