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in reply to •Re: Re: Password hacker killer
in thread Password hacker killer

What about challenging them with simple pseudo riddles. Although not perfect it could work. With enough variation in the questions and the format you could make it difficult.

 Please enter the answer to the following question:
(number of days in a year) + (the hours in a day) + (the number of wis
+e men)

[download]

People friendly, computer not. At least it would stimulate growth in NLP and common sense bots :)

___________
Eric Hodges

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Re: Riddles
by htoug (Deacon) on Sep 12, 2003 at 10:33 UTC
    That suggestion is very culture dependent. I think I know the answer to your question:
    365+24+7
    hmm... or is it 365+12+3?
    or 365+24+3 or...

    You get the idea?

    It gets worse if you use questions that you are 'certain' the users knows the answer to.
    Eg. how many players on a football team?
    Answer: 7, 11 or whatever is the normal number in your context.

[reply]

      Well I thought hours in a day was pretty much a standard. The point either way was that the riddles could be constructed to either be 'known' or look up able. Its not an ideal solutions, i'm not sure there is an idea solution, but if you want to make sure its a person on the other end then make them do something people normaly do better than computers. In general people will be better at finding/knowing answers to a mass of questions. Also you could have three sets of riddles and the person could only answer 2 and still pass, or you could have a set of region dependent riddles, letting the user select his/her region before hand.

      How many planets are occupied by humans + how many moons does earth have?

      how many days are in a week + how many days are in a weekend?

      brides in a wedding + eggs in a dozen + sodas in a six pack

      ___________
      Eric Hodges
[reply]
        Careful with the "brides in a wedding" bit. In Scandanavia, that could be 0 or 1. In other parts of the world, that could be 1-3. *shrugs*

        I would think that better are thing like "eggs in a dozen". (Though, you have to be careful not to say "loaves of bread in a dozen", cause that's 13.)

        Your second question is a little confusing - is the answer 7 or 9?

        And, your first question can have some argument (if you're talking SG-1, of course ...)

        Maybe even better is to provide something like: 

        A*B*C*D*E

Please provide the Nth letter (after "C")

        [download]

        That, to me, would be blind-friendly, foreigner-friendly, and still requires NLP (due to the question which changes every time).

        ------
        We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

        Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

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