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I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of t

I've found it isn't about "perfection". It is about selecting the same tiles as an "average" person would. I might stare hard at an image, think that one of the tiles contains a tiny fragment of a traffic light, and select it. That isn't what most other people have already done, so the captcha thinks I'm a bot and gives me tougher and tougher challenges. Ever since I stopped pixel-peeping and started quickly selecting the tiles that obviously had a bus in them, the percentage of time that I've gotten by first try has gone way up.

an_ko 5y ago
I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.
- kijin 5y ago
  Even if you're right, I doubt it's going to be much worse than the level of the average irritated driver.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  But it will be cheap! - The sound of 1000 business C-levels as your head gets removed by going under a truck.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Pretty much a regular driver then!
  - _moof 5y ago
    Heck, better than a regular driver. At least what we're looking at is outside!
- Kletiomdm 5y ago
  They probably have some statistics in the background which tells them some form of Trustlevel. You also need to assume that there are potentially control pictures in it as well. I think this is a very liable approach.
  - ncann 5y ago
    Yeah, it's not like they will label something a train just because a single person says so. But if you have 10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train, it's very likely to be the case.
    - organsnyder 5y ago
      But GP is describing exactly the opposite: there might be a train that's not immediately visible at a glance, leading most people to not label it.
      - not2b 5y ago
        For unambiguous images almost all humans will label them the same way. For ambiguous ones humans will differ. Presumably they'll accumulate stats on each image and will be able to detect cases like this.
    - rolph 5y ago
      unless a properly obfusicated bot net has seeded the data set with -everything is a train- responses to the tune of >>10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train<<
  - wfleming 5y ago
    I think you meant "viable", not "liable". Given the discussion, your typo is ironically amusing, though.
- luckydata 5y ago
  That's about as much attention the average driver pays anyways. I drive a motorcycle, I KNOW that.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    That's an interesting idea - maybe it would be smart to have captcha's do a "Point out all the motorcycles" or "Click all the pedestrians" setup.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      I love a rant on this one... Sometimes the bus/boat/truck has motorbikes sometimes bicycles. Is that a petrol-powered bicycle, or a motorbike to the [USAmerican?] person who wrote the rules!? Are all large yellow vehicles buses in USA or do you have minibuses, oh wait, are minibuses buses. I've worked out fire engines are trucks for captchas, not sure about Transit-type vehicles, lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks! Is a traffic light only the lens/led array or the black light-holder too? Do pedestrian lights count as traffic lights? Are those weird lights hanging in the middle of junctions 'traffic lights'. Wish they'd just tell you what counts. I have noticed that times I realise after clicking that I missed a square they tend to go through whilst many times I get repeated captchas when I know I got it right. Success, as a user, seems impossible to predict.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        > lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks! In the US, lorry == truck. Never heard the term goods truck before today, but I think it's what we call a boxcar.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        A "truck" on a railway car is apparently a "bogie" in the UK. A bogie in India seems to be a railway car in the US. Then there are intermodal containers, smaller than boxcars, I think they are hauled by truck (lorry) after being unloaded from a flatcar.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  I'd rather that than a computer hemming and hawing over whether a single pixel is an oncoming truck and not turning just in case.
  - masukomi 5y ago
    a computer "hemming and hawing" as that one accident where it couldn't decide if it was a bicycle or a person has nothing to do with the training. It's what the developers decided to do with input that had a low confidence score. There will ALWAYS be low-confidence ratings on real world data regardless of how good your training is. Instead of saying "oh crap there's SOMETHING there we should stop" they said "huh, no let's loop on testing it until we figure it out or run it over....whichever comes first."
    - seg_lol 5y ago
      Also if the car wants to stop too much because of low confidence, just turn the brakes off.
lanstin 5y ago
Replying to an_ko's sibling comment:just like the data behind youtube music recommendations, populated by data carefully analysed from legions of bored toddler clicks vs. Spotify's obsessive teenager music curation
klyrs 5y ago
I kinda go the other way -- could a FFT heuristic mistake this feature for a crosswalk? Then I'll select it, whether or not it's actually crosswalk. Most of the time, this works. It's a stick in the eye of our prenatal robot overlord.
WHA8m 5y ago
Same experience. Once I observed that most (about 9/10) times there are only 3 tiles to select, I stopped looking for a 4th and selected only the 3 most obvious.
bogomipz 5y ago
I've noticed similar. Often with stop lights, where a tiny sliver of one does not neatly fit in the frame, spilling over ever so slightly to the next square which has no stop light otherwise. There's a none too subtle irony in that one is being punished for accuracy when the context is ultimately public safety.
hbarka 5y ago
This. Captcha wants me to choose crosswalks and you can see there’s that sliver of a crosswalk in a few pixels off in another tile. You’re not wrong! But you’re not right. Regression to the mean. A hexagon would be better as a frame instead of a square.
fragmede 5y ago
So take the image, shift it by a fraction of a tile, and rerun.

an_ko 5y ago

I wonder if this means self-driving vehicles' detection of important traffic features will be at the level of an irritated and disinterested web user who is trying to just do the minimum work to please an algorithm.

kijin 5y ago
Even if you're right, I doubt it's going to be much worse than the level of the average irritated driver.
WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
But it will be cheap! - The sound of 1000 business C-levels as your head gets removed by going under a truck.
FredPret 5y ago
Pretty much a regular driver then!
- _moof 5y ago
  Heck, better than a regular driver. At least what we're looking at is outside!
Kletiomdm 5y ago
They probably have some statistics in the background which tells them some form of Trustlevel. You also need to assume that there are potentially control pictures in it as well. I think this is a very liable approach.
- ncann 5y ago
  Yeah, it's not like they will label something a train just because a single person says so. But if you have 10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train, it's very likely to be the case.
  - organsnyder 5y ago
    But GP is describing exactly the opposite: there might be a train that's not immediately visible at a glance, leading most people to not label it.
    - not2b 5y ago
      For unambiguous images almost all humans will label them the same way. For ambiguous ones humans will differ. Presumably they'll accumulate stats on each image and will be able to detect cases like this.
  - rolph 5y ago
    unless a properly obfusicated bot net has seeded the data set with -everything is a train- responses to the tune of >>10k responses with 95% confidence saying it's a train<<
- wfleming 5y ago
  I think you meant "viable", not "liable". Given the discussion, your typo is ironically amusing, though.
luckydata 5y ago
That's about as much attention the average driver pays anyways. I drive a motorcycle, I KNOW that.
- Shared404 5y ago
  That's an interesting idea - maybe it would be smart to have captcha's do a "Point out all the motorcycles" or "Click all the pedestrians" setup.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I love a rant on this one... Sometimes the bus/boat/truck has motorbikes sometimes bicycles. Is that a petrol-powered bicycle, or a motorbike to the [USAmerican?] person who wrote the rules!? Are all large yellow vehicles buses in USA or do you have minibuses, oh wait, are minibuses buses. I've worked out fire engines are trucks for captchas, not sure about Transit-type vehicles, lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks! Is a traffic light only the lens/led array or the black light-holder too? Do pedestrian lights count as traffic lights? Are those weird lights hanging in the middle of junctions 'traffic lights'. Wish they'd just tell you what counts. I have noticed that times I realise after clicking that I missed a square they tend to go through whilst many times I get repeated captchas when I know I got it right. Success, as a user, seems impossible to predict.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
      > lorries are trucks apparently but goods trucks on railways are not trucks! In the US, lorry == truck. Never heard the term goods truck before today, but I think it's what we call a boxcar.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        A "truck" on a railway car is apparently a "bogie" in the UK. A bogie in India seems to be a railway car in the US. Then there are intermodal containers, smaller than boxcars, I think they are hauled by truck (lorry) after being unloaded from a flatcar.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lapetitejort 5y ago
I'd rather that than a computer hemming and hawing over whether a single pixel is an oncoming truck and not turning just in case.
- masukomi 5y ago
  a computer "hemming and hawing" as that one accident where it couldn't decide if it was a bicycle or a person has nothing to do with the training. It's what the developers decided to do with input that had a low confidence score. There will ALWAYS be low-confidence ratings on real world data regardless of how good your training is. Instead of saying "oh crap there's SOMETHING there we should stop" they said "huh, no let's loop on testing it until we figure it out or run it over....whichever comes first."
  - seg_lol 5y ago
    Also if the car wants to stop too much because of low confidence, just turn the brakes off.

lanstin 5y ago

Replying to an_ko's sibling comment:just like the data behind youtube music recommendations, populated by data carefully analysed from legions of bored toddler clicks vs. Spotify's obsessive teenager music curation

klyrs 5y ago

I kinda go the other way -- could a FFT heuristic mistake this feature for a crosswalk? Then I'll select it, whether or not it's actually crosswalk. Most of the time, this works. It's a stick in the eye of our prenatal robot overlord.

WHA8m 5y ago

Same experience. Once I observed that most (about 9/10) times there are only 3 tiles to select, I stopped looking for a 4th and selected only the 3 most obvious.

bogomipz 5y ago

I've noticed similar. Often with stop lights, where a tiny sliver of one does not neatly fit in the frame, spilling over ever so slightly to the next square which has no stop light otherwise. There's a none too subtle irony in that one is being punished for accuracy when the context is ultimately public safety.

hbarka 5y ago

This. Captcha wants me to choose crosswalks and you can see there’s that sliver of a crosswalk in a few pixels off in another tile. You’re not wrong! But you’re not right. Regression to the mean. A hexagon would be better as a frame instead of a square.

fragmede 5y ago

So take the image, shift it by a fraction of a tile, and rerun.