A Case for CTFs

During my initial forays in trying to acquaint myself with Linux, I was extremely disenchanted by the fact that the users who had Linux as their main operating system predominantly relied on the command line to navigate their machine and to perform general operations for which I had heretofore only used GUI ( Graphical User Interface ). I felt that this operating system was only reserved for those who possessed the utmost technical expertise in computing and remained far from reach to a plebeian like myself who perceived the notion of interacting with machines through commands in utter perplexity. Isn't it needlessly laborious to type a long string of commands to perform tasks as trivial as moving files or changing directories (called folders in Windows)? The benefits of this seemingly archaic mode of interaction wasn't obvious to me at first sight but perhaps I was too new to this frontier to arrive at an unprejudiced conclusion.

Notwithstanding the innumerable difficulties I had faced in using the terminal, a zeal for mastering the command line sustained me through the misery of deserting my proclivity for clicking and dragging. But most importantly a discovery I made which helped me immensely in the course of this venture was something called CTFs.

CTFs or Capture the Flags are programming challenges designed to test your abilities in a technical area of your choosing. The challenges, although trying to model real world problems, contain avenues of ingress that can only be discerned if you have a reasonable grasp of the various domains in which the challenge intersects. So not only does it require an understanding of programming and computers but also equally imposes a demand for distinguishing how your technical knowledge manifests itself in subtle circumstances.

When I first discovered such elaborate intellectual puzzles contrived for nothing but the sheer delight one obtains from solving them, not only was I taken aback by the complexity of the problems but was also positively surprised to learn that the challenges often required more than just intelligence and technical rigour. What was needed most of all was the insatiable thirst for knowledge and the perseverance to attain it. This perhaps was one of the most important realizations I had in the course of this endeavour and I believe a few words are in order for me to explain why.

The qualities that are generally cultivated in contemporary institutions are obedience and the capacity to effectively understand and implement what is being told. In the course of this conditioning, intelligence coupled with subservience to authority becomes the most desirable traits for an ideal working man. As knowledge becomes too specialized, the general delight in questioning and solving problems of personal concern is abandoned at the behest of an abstract entity upon which we confer our responsibility to learn and to grow. We forsake the capacity we have to seek out our own questions and settle for those that are handed down to us regardless of how dreary they might appear.

CTFs, I think, are quite useful in this regard because they helped me realize that there were questions in this world that are worthy of solving not for academic validation or for the gratification of being intellectually superior to your fellow peers but for the sheer pleasure of expanding the frontiers of human understanding. In addition to the technical knowledge one might accrue in the course of solving CTFs, the unspeakable joy of comprehending what was formerly inexplicable renders the need to derive motivation from an external recourse to be entirely superfluous. Instead of finding solutions to be the only purpose to learning, one comes to regard the pursuit itself to be intrinsically valuable because in his attempt to demystify the unknown he finds himself engaged in the most primordial of human ventures. And the fact that such veritable truths can be discovered through programs consisting of long strings of 1s and 0s perhaps indicates that computers might not be as mechanical as they seem.