A CAPTCHA hid letters in motion, and OpenCV solved it before the model did
alex_verem · x · 2026-07-24
A viral CAPTCHA hid letters in motion rather than in any single frame: colored shapes moved across a matching background so screenshots showed nothing readable. The post argues that an LLM spent 10 minutes and 100,000 tokens trying to infer the text, while classic computer vision with OpenCV dense optical flow solved it in under a second.
It then notes that multiple people produced scripts that solved the challenge in milliseconds, one in just 109 lines. The punchline is that the model reinvented a standard CV technique, showing how often simpler tools beat frontier AI when the problem has already been solved years ago.
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