"Easy" mode

[KianBrose]

Unironically it would be great to have a really really simple problem, I'm talking 3x = 15 to just defer the most braindead individuals from a website, or just different levels of difficulty

[ballerburg9005]

I think it would defeat the point of this specific captcha. And there are already plenty of captchas that ask excessively easy math questions such as "What is 5 + 5?". As it is now, the bar is already very low. Even people who don't know anything about calculus can simply solve for derivatives with online tools. Maybe some matrices are hard, but some are not, such that pretty much anyone is able to solve one of them by reloading the page a couple of times. But it still is a mini IQ test of sorts. And that is also how the user will perceive it. It is the selling point of this captcha, what makes it special and unique.

The experiment has proven, that especially trolls can be really stupid and really motivated at the same time and thus will be able to solve the captcha. This was to be expected to some degree.

So I think the main practical point of the captcha (besides being funny) really is just to annoy average people. It doesn't really work against outright trolls, but it will probably work very well against the average reader of your blog, who just read the first 15% of your article and then wants to crap their opinion piece below. Also it probably works well against what is called "system 1 thinking" (automatic, biased and subconscious thoughts and actions) and pushes people to use "system 2" instead (logic and reasoning that requires active conscious effort).

There is another "IQcaptcha" written in NodeJS, that generates Raven's matrices directly on Canvas. My development plan is to first port his code to PHP before implementing any new features. If there will be an "easier" or harder mode in the future, I think it will be rather in the form of new matrices and possibly the ability to skip the differential equation.