With that idea, you (the captcha maker) would also have to write some code that computes how long humans should take to do a task (so that you can time the user and compare that with what your code spits out). Whatever code you write, the bot makers could eventually figure out what you wrote, and copy that.
To put it another way, when you say “humans would spend more time on the second task” with your two examples, you would have to write specific rules about how long humans would take, so that your captcha can enforce those rules. But then the bot makers could use trial and error to figure out what your rules were and then write code that waits exactly as long as you’re expecting.
It’s true that a bot can be specialised to solve it, but i feel that is the case no matter what you do.
To me the appeal of this approach is that it is very simple for a human to make the rules (e.g. numbers with two digits are harder to add than numbers with one digit, or "the more leading letters two words have in common, the harder they are to sort) but for a bot to figure out the rules by trial and error (while answering at human-like speed) will take time. So the set of questions can be changed quite often at low cost, making it less feasible to re-train the bot every time.
Another alternative could be to only give questions that are trivial for a bot, but annoyingly difficult for a human, and let them through if they press “reset captcha” a couple times, though some people might find that annoying…
But note that humans also take awhile to learn these games/rules, and each version of these rules is probably going to accidentally lock people out (and those people will probably get angry). There’s a nonzero cost to making people do new things, even when those things are net positive (think about a favorite game that had a UI patch or some such).
With that idea, you (the captcha maker) would also have to write some code that computes how long humans should take to do a task (so that you can time the user and compare that with what your code spits out). Whatever code you write, the bot makers could eventually figure out what you wrote, and copy that.
To put it another way, when you say “humans would spend more time on the second task” with your two examples, you would have to write specific rules about how long humans would take, so that your captcha can enforce those rules. But then the bot makers could use trial and error to figure out what your rules were and then write code that waits exactly as long as you’re expecting.
It’s true that a bot can be specialised to solve it, but i feel that is the case no matter what you do.
To me the appeal of this approach is that it is very simple for a human to make the rules (e.g. numbers with two digits are harder to add than numbers with one digit, or "the more leading letters two words have in common, the harder they are to sort) but for a bot to figure out the rules by trial and error (while answering at human-like speed) will take time. So the set of questions can be changed quite often at low cost, making it less feasible to re-train the bot every time.
Another alternative could be to only give questions that are trivial for a bot, but annoyingly difficult for a human, and let them through if they press “reset captcha” a couple times, though some people might find that annoying…
But note that humans also take awhile to learn these games/rules, and each version of these rules is probably going to accidentally lock people out (and those people will probably get angry). There’s a nonzero cost to making people do new things, even when those things are net positive (think about a favorite game that had a UI patch or some such).