Building a Bejeweled Bot(runawaycoder.co.za)

runawaycoder.co.za

http://runawaycoder.co.za/2012/03/31/BejeweledBot.html

13 comments

Very interesting. I'm also very interested in making bots to automate various web games, in my case casino games.

When I was in college, I came across a gambling strategy for online roulette. I tested it for a few weeks but I gave up on it as it was extremely boring and tedious, even though it seems legitimately profitable. A few years later I heard about bots that automate poker and so on, so I looked at tools that I could use to code up the roulette strategy to play it automatically. I looked into AutoIt and wrote some scripts, but the code ended up being beyond my ability to write, as my knowledge of AutoIt starting out was zero. Even a relatively simple game like roulette (only 37 supposedly random possible outcomes on a European roulette table) ended up having bot logic that was quite complex.

However a few weeks ago I came across this excellent article:

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/workflow/how-to-build-a...

So I looked at re-writing the bot in Python instead. Turns out that writing it in Python is FAR simpler than AutoIt, and the code far simpler to figure out. Even though I had close to zero knowledge of Python starting out (learning Python really quickly by using it to build a real project, rather than learning Python theory first.) Now my bot is about 90% complete, just a couple of steps away from having a working (potentially profitable) bot.

Really cool what you can do in a few weeks in Python from a standing start.

goostavos14 anni fa

Hey! That's me! I wrote that there tutorial.

Ignore my shameful, newbie-ish coding practices in that tutorial..

patrickk14 anni fa

There's nothing to be ashamed of! I learned an awful lot from it. The part where you "read" values from the screen was particularly interesting. I had coded up the equivalent functionality in AutoIt, it involved iterating through an array of all possible images (stored locally)....ugh. Utter mess. Your method was much cleaner.

How did you get interested in automating web games? What is your background? Any other interesting projects you are cooking up?

I find the whole area of automating tedious human-driven actions fascinating. If the roulette bot works out, my next project is going to be automating spread betting/forex trading or perhaps some sort of sports betting arbitrage. Loads of possibilities out there in my opinion.

ps. If I end up 'making bank' as a result, let me know where I send the cheque as a thank you. My email is in my profile ;-)

goostavos14 anni fa

Ha, these Bejeweled Bots are actually what got me into this stuff. Not this one specifically, but someone linked to video of a Bejeweled Blitz bot on /r/programming awhile ago. I was instantly fascinated.

No cool projects yet. There is a bot that I've been really wanting to make, just because I can't get past the stupid 4th level, but it requires a bit more brain power than I currently have..

Speaking of which, if you're interesting in the computer vision-y stuff check this out: http://www.udacity.com/. They're having a class on programming a robotic car. It looks like it will touch on some pretty neat vision stuff.

patrickk14 anni fa

It's funny, I was just discussing udacity with a co-worker today. I might try some of the easier courses before I tackle the more hardcore topics like a self-driving car!

On a slightly tangential note, I'm blown away when I look at the learning resources on the web in the last year or two. I largely learned the (admittedly rudimentary) iOS knowledge I have from the Stanford U course on iTunes[1]. Then you look at things like Udacity, Coursera and Khan Academy. In the case of the self-driving car course, you are getting a world-class computer-science education, free, from one of the foremost experts in AI, all from the comfort of your own bedroom. We might not have flying cars yet, but you can get a world-class education for free! The times we live in.

I'd also encourage you to do more write ups on your bot experiences! You have a knack for explaining things well. I'm toying with the idea of doing maybe a series of YouTube videos or blog posts myself once my Python skills get above the level of being totally embarrassing ;-)

BTW, here's a link for a series of blog posts on how this guy builds working poker bots:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090608115755/http://www.codingt...

http://web.archive.org/web/20100130074034/http://www.codingt...

(Had to put it through the wayback machine as some current employer of his persuaded him to take the content offline!) Not sure if it's something you would be interested in, but have a look at some of the content. He goes through using Monte Carlo simulations and everything to aid decision making. Very C++ and Windows based, but have a look nonetheless, there may be transferable concepts to your own projects.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-...

goostavos14 anni fa

Just finished reading through that first link. Very interesting stuff! If I knew anything at all about how poker was played I might try to make one myself ;)

I completely agree about the current times, man. The amount of free (and quality!) educational material right now is pretty staggering. The Khan Academy alone was amazing, but now with things like Coursera, and the MIT open courses, it's pretty freaking unbelievable what's now at our fingertips.

Definitely make those videos and blog posts! And send me a PM when you do :)

patrickk14 anni fa

Poker is a simple game to learn if that's something you are interested in. "5 minutes to learn, a lifetime to master", is the cliche used. If you are interested in learning more, the second article in that series of posts I linked to has a 'recommended reading' section (Ctrl+F/ Cmd+F for "recommended reading"):

http://web.archive.org/web/20100127104229/http://www.codingt...

I'm hardly a poker shark myself, I just used to play a few local free-roll Texas Hold Em (THE) tournaments in my local area and online back in college. The rules are freely available all over the internet, as well as strategy guides, poker hand calculators, etc. The cool thing is most online casinos have a "practice play" section where you get like 1000 play money credits every day, so you can test and refine your poker bot without having to deposit cash.

If you include your email address in your profile "about" section, I'll be sure to fire you an email if and when I do publish a series on any bots I make! It might be some time though, my mad skillz are somewhat lacking at the moment sadly. I'll post it here on hn and r/programming too, I'd be curious to hear what people think.

ps. I think I may have found the article you referred to about the Bejewled bot:

http://hackaday.com/2011/07/30/bejeweled-blitz-bot-makes-you...

Some nice links in the comments there too.

RC114014 anni fa

Thanks for that link , I really did want to use python for my bot (i got reasonably far) , but after digging through the autoit docs it turned out that what I was trying to do in python could be done alot simpler in AutoIt. Specifically I did not have to worry about grabbing an image of the screen and then searching the image for a pixel (to determine the start location) , I could instead just search for the start pixel using a built function in autoit.

Lozzer14 anni fa

I had a go at something similar for the Facebook version a couple of years ago. My main goal was to stop playing the game, but it was also an excuse to try Clojure. At the time it absolutely thrashed my best scores, though I'm sure it won't work with the updates the developers have made since then.

I think it was the first thing I wrote that drove home the power of having a REPL for exploratory programming:

https://gist.github.com/490689

karpathy14 anni fa

I would recommend using AutoHotkey instead of AutoIt. I wrote some bots for fun for a few similar games but skipped Bejeweled in favor of (a simpler) alternative called Diamond Dash. The bot could hold its own but it couldn't beat some of my better friends. To squeeze out the extra performance one has to start doing much more complicated things. For example, the blocks in these games rarely appear in fixed coordinates but slide around, explode (and therefore partially occlude other tiles), etc. Recently, this has been turning into a bit of a cat and mouse game with game developers. For example, they started adding noise on top of sprites to throw off very simple methods.

But there is something very fun in developing scripts that moves your mouse around and play for you. I like that game much better :)

RC114014 anni fa

Thanks for the feedback , I will look into autohotkey but in the end autoit was just there to get me started, I want to look at a other languages just to see how it would be done differently.

patrickk14 anni fa

I looked into AHK for my roulette bot originally. AutoIt is quite similar to AHK but it can do more complex stuff. If you are just looking for basic GUI manipulation then AHK is your tool for the job.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1686975/choosing-a-window...

tldnr14 anni fa

Interesting post, a few friends and I did something similar in Java/C# a while back. It's surprisingly easy to automate, and very satisfying to see working.