Building a Bejeweled Bot

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

by RC1140 • 14 years ago

22 13 14 years ago

runawaycoder.co.za

patrickk5• 14 years ago

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.

RC11402• 14 years ago

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.

goostavos3• 14 years ago

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

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

patrickk5• 14 years ago

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 ;-)

karpathy• 14 years ago

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 :)

RC11402• 14 years ago

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.

patrickk5• 14 years ago

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...

Lozzer• 14 years ago

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

tldnr• 14 years ago

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.

Building a Bejeweled Bot

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