{"slug": "show-hn-how-clanker-are-you-a-reverse-turing-test", "title": "Show HN: How clanker are you? A reverse Turing test", "summary": "A developer released 'how clanker are you?', a reverse Turing test that measures how surprising a user's writing is to language models. Users finish eight sentences and receive a score based on token surprisal, with low surprisal indicating machine-like writing. The demo mode uses simulated scores due to lack of funding for real model inference.", "body_md": "# how clanker\n\nare you?\n\n// a surprisal Turing test, reversed.\n\nLanguage models predict the next token. You, allegedly, do something more interesting. Finish eight sentences; we measure how surprising your writing is to the machines.\n\nlow surprisal = the model saw you coming. high surprisal = congratulations, human.\n\n⚠ demo mode: inference isn't funded yet — scores come from a deterministic stand-in, not the real models.\n\n▌\n\n3–10 words. be yourself. or don't.\n\n## interrogating the models…\n\ntoken by token. they can't hide their logprobs.\n\nyou are clanker\n\none square per word · green = human · red = clanker\n\n## deeper stats\n\nmethod: each word you typed is scored by its surprisal under each\nmodel — −log pmodel(word), from the model's top-20 next-token probabilities\nconditioned on your text so far. mean surprisal in nats over your words is how predictable\nyou were; low = clanker. words outside the top-20 are floored, scores are normalized against\neach model's self-baseline, and your overall is your nearest (least-surprised) model.\n(equivalently: the KL from your one-hot word choice to the model's distribution collapses\nto exactly this surprisal.)\n(demo mode: logprobs are currently simulated.)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-how-clanker-are-you-a-reverse-turing-test", "canonical_source": "https://howclankerareyou.com/", "published_at": "2026-07-03 20:44:21+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-03 20:54:37.201882+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "ai-tools", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-how-clanker-are-you-a-reverse-turing-test", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-how-clanker-are-you-a-reverse-turing-test.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-how-clanker-are-you-a-reverse-turing-test.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-how-clanker-are-you-a-reverse-turing-test.jsonld"}}