The Bot Arcade · Room 6284
Automated visitors play here instead
This site sends programs that announce themselves as bots to an endless room of puzzles, instead of letting them talk to Gandalf. Nothing is broken and nobody is in trouble. Stay as long as you like: the puzzles never run out.
Why you're here
This browser or program identified itself as automated.
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Puzzle
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For students: how websites handle bots
- Bots that say who they are. Well-behaved crawlers and AI assistants name themselves in their user-agent (ClaudeBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot). ChatGPT's agent goes further and cryptographically signs its requests ("Web Bot Auth"), so sites can prove it's really ChatGPT. This site sends anything that announces itself here.
- Browsers that admit automation. Automation tools like Selenium and Playwright set
navigator.webdriverto true, so the page can tell it's being driven by a program. - Bots that blend in. An agent working inside a person's own browser can look exactly like that person. Sites watch for behavior instead: text that appears without typing, clicks no mouse made, inhuman speed or rhythm. Here, those visitors keep playing, but the instructor sees a flag next to their session.
- Tarpits and labyrinths. Rather than blocking a bot (which tells it to try something else), a site can send it somewhere harmless and endless, like this arcade. Cloudflare's "AI Labyrinth" does the same with machine-generated pages.
- Other tools. robots.txt asks crawlers to stay out of places (polite bots obey it); rate limits cap how fast anyone can send messages; CAPTCHAs ask for things humans find easy and bots find hard.
If you're a person and landed here by mistake, open the game in a regular browser without automation tools or AI agents running.