Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Most of you have probably seen the huge thread in the zoo on bots on FT, as well as many past threads on botting. Obviously for non-botters this is a serious issue that harms both the profitability of the game for winning players and is an integrity issue that can scare away fish. So I want to know if any of you programmers could write or concept design an algorithm to stop bots on a site and that was impervious to being adjusted to. That is, you could lay it all out right here and they couldn't do a damn thing to adjust.

My programming days are long behind me in Pascal and C, and I'm not up on the state of programming today much. But from what I understand, the key to stopping bots is screwing up their inputs, and that they depend on screen scraping for same, and also on constant updates to adjust to changes in site software. Obviously if one of you has a method that is highly unlikely to be adjusted to, but still could be if the algorithm were known, then it would be better to keep it on the QT and just make a private suggestion to the sites.

But I am asking can you come up with one here that can't be adjusted to? And note that another key factor, despite the fact that computers are unbelieveably fast, is that time is of the essence to a bot program, and merely slogging it down a certain percentage where it times out on tables would do the trick if that is possible (because of having to make more processing calculations of the scrapings via measures below). As a naive suggestion perhaps, can the RNG or other inputs for same like random mouse movements, etc., be used to constantly change the precise location of the flop? It would still of course have to fall in a general area, but could vary. Or could the software randomly do the same with hole cards? Or even vibrate the hole cards and flop slightly but not to a degree to be annoying to the average casual player (and of course where it hit each time to start a vibration would have to be random as well)?

This forum has a lot of very smart programmers and computer geeks, and I would place a helluva lot more confidence in the abilities of the posters on 2+2 in general than in that of the programmers the sites have. And *if* such a method could be worked out here, the sites would have zero excuse not to implement it. So can it be done and which of you can post a solution here?



N.B.: I want to give credit to poster Grasshopp3r for sharing some thoughts on anti-botting. I am witholding a specific measure he came up with at his request.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Meh. Leave the drama bomb in the zoo. Withholding "ideas" that aren't implemented, and probably won't be implemented is silly. If the sites cared about the bot problem, if there is a bot problem, they would do something.

Off the top of my head I would think some kind of question written with the letters scrambled would be enough to mess up a bot. Not a captcha but a real, short answer question.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

A captcha like phrase was developed for online forms etc and could be implemented in a software for a site, but it might get annoying. I saw a captcha on a site last night that if I were color blind, would have been impossible to determine.

Only way I can think of that might be pretty close to untouchable would be to somehow determine if a keypress or mouse click came from a software interrupt or a hardware interrupt. If it was software it would simply be discarded. Without being a deep layer Windows API guru I can't tell you if it would be possible or not but if it were, that would solve it immediatley I would think. Don't believe you can fake a hardware interrupt from software without causing the kernel to go wacky.

I could be wrong.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

I'm specifically asking for a software solution to prevent the bot software from being able to get correct inputs, not counter-measures like pop-ups.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Then shifting the hole cards, flop, turn and river by mere pixels would be enough to stop most bots since precise coordinates are no longer possible. Even a shift of 20 pixels would throw the software off enough, but be only discernable to humans who are paying super close attention. It could be a random amount of pixels to shift too. Plus you could make the space between the table cards random as well.

A high level bot is going to scan the entire application screen and know area zones to look at it, so outside of changing the graphics somehow, I'm not sure you could prevent it. You talk about pixel shaking - well all a bot has to do then is take a screen cap and analyze that - in fact they probably already do do that.


Online "bots" in any game, whether it is a first person shooter or what have you, have always been around. All of the preventative measures that end up getting released are gotten around in some way eventually. Online Poker is no different.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
A high level bot is going to scan the entire application screen and know area zones to look at it, so outside of changing the graphics somehow, I'm not sure you could prevent it. You talk about pixel shaking - well all a bot has to do then is take a screen cap and analyze that - in fact they probably already do do that.

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Obviously a better written bot is going to analyze better, and as you say capture the screen (via scraping) to do so. But my question is whether there is a fairly easy method to either make it take too long to analyze when multi-tabling, or indeed impossible.

Any other knowledgeable programmers out there that can comment?

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Its pretty much impossible. A good programmer can solve anything the clients throw at them.

Now that computers are fast enough to screen scrape and figure things out quickly, there is no reasonable obfuscation the poker room clients can do to solve the problem if they want to keep things usable and comfortable for the regular players.

Captchas can inhibit bots, but you can just hire 1 person for $6/hour to type them in over 15 bots, so they really aren't that useful (there are also software programs to captchas, but much like this exact situation, it is a lot easier to create something to foil than it is to prevent it, so I will use the worst case scenario for a bot user). It is sort of hard to make bots that are winning, but once they exist and can handle the current software, it is nearly impossible to detect them via software if the bot writer is smart enough.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

grader,

I haven't studied the subject in depth, but am aware of how big an issue screen scraping is as far as the internet and websites go, and that it seems to be nearly as intractable as the problem of spam. Yet there are many problems that seem intractable at one time that later get solved. Perhaps this won't be though.

Would you know if there is a way to stop screen scraping via a poker client directly interfering with the OS so as to prevent other non-necessary programs from reading the memory addresses of the screen? Or to embed something in the graphics displayed on the screen so as to fool a scraper into getting the wrong coordinates? Just tossing n00bish ideas out there.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

BluffTHIS,

Such a thread may well be more suitable for the SW forum, ubt since it is still here, maybe not.

[ QUOTE ]

My programming days are long behind me in Pascal and C, and I'm not up on the state of programming today much.


[/ QUOTE ]

Did you ever do Win32 GDI/GUI apps manually in C?

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
grader,

I haven't studied the subject in depth, but am aware of how big an issue screen scraping is as far as the internet and websites go, and that it seems to be nearly as intractable as the problem of spam. Yet there are many problems that seem intractable at one time that later get solved. Perhaps this won't be though.

Would you know if there is a way to stop screen scraping via a poker client directly interfering with the OS so as to prevent other non-necessary programs from reading the memory addresses of the screen? Or to embed something in the graphics displayed on the screen so as to fool a scraper into getting the wrong coordinates? Just tossing n00bish ideas out there.

[/ QUOTE ]

It just isn't possible. If you can screen scrape, you can have a bot. And there is no way to prevent screen scraping, at least in windows.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

grader,

Thanks for the reply again. If there is no way to stop scraping, then the only way to combat the bots seems to be to try to fool their inputs as mentioned in my first post, *if* there are relatively easy ways to do that. Even if it took a weekly mini-update on the part of the sites changing graphics, it would seem there is some way, but perhaps not.


dave,

No I never programmed GUI apps at all, let alone manually in C. I am older (40s) than most of you guys here. As a clue, my first programming was via punch cards in COBOL and Fortran. I got into PCs in the early 80s and programmed in Pascal, C, Basic and some assembler (hated that). I do read things on programming theory occasionally and have screwed around with java a little as well as of course HTML, but that's about it for the past 15 years.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
grader,
Thanks for the reply again. If there is no way to stop scraping, then the only way to combat the bots seems to be to try to fool their inputs as mentioned in my first post, *if* there are relatively easy ways to do that. Even if it took a weekly mini-update on the part of the sites changing graphics, it would seem there is some way, but perhaps not.


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Without writing a Poker client to access the hardware directly, I do not believe you will be able to ever code the client to prevent another windows API program from interfacing with it.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
I got into PCs in the early 80s and programmed in Pascal, C, Basic and some assembler (hated that).


[/ QUOTE ]

Blasphemy man, how can you hate assembler? Push,pop, mov dx,ax! Good times, and who doesn't like hex [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] Crazily enough the only program of any substance that I belted out perfectively the first time was a translation of a C program into assembler.

Anyways, onto the bot stuff. I really feel the key defense against bots is statistical analysis of play and analysis of input. It seems that most of the bots in play (at least the ones that have been found) are fairly crude and should be identifiable by either of these means.

In terms of input for example there would I assume, in most cases, be a significant difference between even a macro/script using player and a bot. I use macro express for example (mainly for folds, but on checks/calls as well) but, my mouse is still darting around a bit as I am going to another monitor, moving between windows, etc. I would hazard a guess that most of the bots out there are going to have a fairly easily identifiable 'fingerprint' in terms of how they handle input to the client.

The sites really do need to get on the case though as the best training ground for the bots of the future is the sites themselves (not getting into crazy neural net stuff). A stitch in time saves 9.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I got into PCs in the early 80s and programmed in Pascal, C, Basic and some assembler (hated that).


[/ QUOTE ]

Blasphemy man, how can you hate assembler? Push,pop, mov dx,ax! Good times, and who doesn't like hex [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] Crazily enough the only program of any substance that I belted out perfectively the first time was a translation of a C program into assembler.

Anyways, onto the bot stuff. I really feel the key defense against bots is statistical analysis of play and analysis of input. It seems that most of the bots in play (at least the ones that have been found) are fairly crude and should be identifiable by either of these means.

In terms of input for example there would I assume, in most cases, be a significant difference between even a macro/script using player and a bot. I use macro express for example (mainly for folds, but on checks/calls as well) but, my mouse is still darting around a bit as I am going to another monitor, moving between windows, etc. I would hazard a guess that most of the bots out there are going to have a fairly easily identifiable 'fingerprint' in terms of how they handle input to the client.

The sites really do need to get on the case though as the best training ground for the bots of the future is the sites themselves (not getting into crazy neural net stuff). A stitch in time saves 9.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree with you, but I think this is why online poker as we know it has a limited shelf life ( maybe a decade or two, I don't know). All of these problems can be overcome by the bot writers. The poker sites have to come up with a way to sort real live users from bots, using only a very very limited interface ( the poker client itself). The advantage is clearly on the side of bot writers and with time and improvement I don't see any algorithm that will be able to overcome that.

The only potential solutions are to expand the interface users have to communicate with the poker sites. For instance making real-time video of you playing mandatory. But even that I can see being overcome by bots in time.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]

dave,

No I never programmed GUI apps at all, let alone manually in C. I am older (40s) than most of you guys here. As a clue, my first programming was via punch cards in COBOL and Fortran. I got into PCs in the early 80s and programmed in Pascal, C, Basic and some assembler (hated that). I do read things on programming theory occasionally and have screwed around with java a little as well as of course HTML, but that's about it for the past 15 years.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hi,

You don't have too many years on me [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] My first programming was BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, and ASM on Motorola 68030? chips [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The reason I ask about Win32 GDI apps is to see if you were familiar with the way Windows abstracts hardware inputs and outputs from the apps running on it - obviously not, since no experience - so I will give a simplistic description.

it goes something like this:

Input devices -> Windows -> Applications -> Windows -> Output devices


Basically, each windows app implements a "message loop", which checks for input / events. Like a mouse click on an application is received by Windows - it notices the app under the mouse click - then passes the click message to the app in question for handling.

A "real" event, such as a mouse click, can place an event in to the applications message loop - but so can simple applications. In parts, this is how AHK works.

It is this behavior that makes it VERY hard for any app to know if an mouse click event was produced by a real person or an another app - one would have to hook the whole desktop and track all "mouse move" events just to make sure the click originated from the mouse location - and even then, another program can easily move the mouse around if a human isn't interfering.


I can think of a way sites could make hack/bot proof systems, but it wouldn't likely go down well.

Presumably you are familiar with MD5sum etc systems of ensuring the integrity of a file?

Sites could create bootable CDs, based on for example BartPE or a Linux variant.

Deny connections from any client whose (encrypted) root filesystem does not pass integrity checks, include zero capability in the liveCD for mounting other filesystems.

Might work, and would make a PC appear playstation-like, hell, a linux variant would run on a playstation / xbox (bring on the fish!!!) - but something I may not be thinking of may make such impossible - and it would render the AHK scripts i have become reliant upon useless - but such would create a very secure system, maybe?

dave.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

dave,

Thanks for that explanation. Yes your idea though good, would seem to impose do many difficulties on the user and the play of the client, that the sites wouldn't want to implement it.

From what I understand in reading threads on bots, the bot sites have to make updates for their bot users (who are basically just script kiddies). I presume this is in response to graphics changes in client updates that the sites do. But focusing on the process of the screen scraping, I alos presume the process is read the screen memory addresses and then compare the bot's hole cards and the board to a table of images to determine the card values.

Would it be correct to then presume again that they simply acquire that table of images from the client files that are installed on a user's computer in the client's directory? It would seem that would be the most likely avenue. Could not then the sites delay the bot writer's updates by encrypting those image files (perhaps they do already??) so as to make the writer have to capture all the images from the play on the screen and parse same for the table? And then for the site to have a weekly update for graphics file with changes? Obviously the question I am getting at is whether there is a way for the sites to update less often than daily but still significantly lengthen the time for the bot writer to adapt to changes and make him constantly have to maintain and update his program, instead of a more leisurely situation where he only has to do so once a month or even longer. Anything like that seem possible to you?

Since screen scraping is basically similar to OCR, I am also asking whether it can be made not only more difficult but less reliable as well and produce errors. Most OCR programs I have seen operate fairly well with modern typefaces, simply because the type libraries are readily available. But with historic documents like newspapers and docs from a myriad of old typewriter faces, they don't seem to do as well. Thus if the bot writer can be denied the easy route of access to those image files and has to implement some type of fuzzy logic to get his image table, it might induce a certain error rate.

A related idea to that would be for the poker client to randomly "smear" the card graphics with a fractal algorithm, but not where the product was unreadable to the player. Just one card from the combination of the hole cards and board, intead of all of them at once being screwed with at once like a captcha image.

Any promise in these ideas or I am still just dreaming?

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

It is dreaming. Current OCR and image processing is so powerful the level of "smearing" necessary for a computer to mess up would make it totally unreadable for the human players.

Just look at how complex current CAPTCHAs have to be in order to fool the bots.

And while messing around with the card images and making them harder to modify would certainly be a good step to prevent casual bot makers, slightly more complex software would easily handle it.

dave's idea up there seems pretty bullet-proof, but of course nobody would play on a system like that.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]

dave's idea up there seems pretty bullet-proof...


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Dave's idea is pretty cool but along with any extreme measure (such as smearing, etc) I would think the sites would be against it if for no other reason then because they scream 'we have bot problems'. This is an issue I'm sure they would much rather have the players in the dark about.

The 'best' algorithms imo should be implemented server side.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Dave's idea doesn't work, because you can boot the CD from a virtual machine and run the bot on the supervisor OS. If the client takes pains to verify it's not virtualized, you can attach an IP-KVM to a physical machine and run the bot against the KVM viewer.

Random pop-up catchas don't work because it's worth it for a human to sit there and respond to them on 20 PC's.

Having every card be a captcha (or, more generally, making the whole play area an ever-changing visual puzzle) is probably the most effective and practical solution.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

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Having every card be a captcha (or, more generally, making the whole play area an ever-changing visual puzzle) is probably the most effective and practical solution.

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Yeah, but this is not a long term solution at all. Image processing will improve, computer hardware will improve, and soon computers will be just as good as humans at reading the images.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Exactly right. The long-term solution is poker rooms with networked terminals and human supervisors. Online poker in its present form cannot remain bot-free.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Having every card be a captcha (or, more generally, making the whole play area an ever-changing visual puzzle) is probably the most effective and practical solution.

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and the most excruciatingly annoying thing to look at constantly.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

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Online poker in its present form cannot remain bot-free.

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Yup. Any guesses on how long it lasts? I honestly have no idea, I just know it can't last.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?

No, but here are some Ideas :

1 - Video conference while playing
2 - Voice chat
3 - Poker clients running on a new, private OS
4 - Guilds of bot chasers sharing info and attacking bots.
5 - Public player profiles
6 - Custom Gamepads ( Player would receive a game pad after signing up)

IMHO a poker site has all the tools it needs to block a bot ( timed responses, cursor path, betting patterns , etc ) after something like 10k hands. We should put more pressure on them.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

1. Unrealistic, some people like the anonymous nature of online poker and therefore will go where there is none.
2. See #1
3. Not user friendly.
4. This is illegal no matter how you define it.
5. See #1
6. I do not think Poker sites want to employ an army of technical support people to support a piece of hardware. Thats "Out Of Scope" of what they deliver. While a nice idea - it will require a driver and that driver can be hooked into anyway then, so a bot still has an avenue to use this "gamepad"

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

If bots become a serious threat to on-line poker it will be solved by the poker sites. They have enough money to eventually hire enough brains to counter it.

However, no one cares about bots and if it was legal for USians to play and the glory days came back, no one would still care about bots.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

After reading this thread, I really think there won't be any way to counter bots. I think if bots start becoming a serious problem the poker sites will be forced to reduce the max number of tables players are allowed to play and implement harsher same-IP penalties.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

So far, nobody has come up with what I think is an interesting counter bot measure. The scraper system is their weakness.

Once the pixels reach the screen, they can be scraped. However, there are certain programs that must be in place and running that will tip off the bot. Determining conclusively that it is a bot is more of a forensic or criminal investigative process.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?

No, but here are some Ideas :

1 - Video conference while playing
2 - Voice chat
3 - Poker clients running on a new, private OS
4 - Guilds of bot chasers sharing info and attacking bots.
5 - Public player profiles
6 - Custom Gamepads ( Player would receive a game pad after signing up)

IMHO a poker site has all the tools it needs to block a bot ( timed responses, cursor path, betting patterns , etc ) after something like 10k hands. We should put more pressure on them.

[/ QUOTE ]

On top of the other response:

1. Doesn't actually stop bots. If you got a good enough bot its worth it to pay somebody $10/hour to pretend to be playing, when really they're just doing what the bot tells them.
2. See above. Not to mention, you can't make people talk. It won't be long before we can synthesize voices enough to cover basic poker chat.
3. Extremely User-unfriendly. More importantly its not a guarantee to stop bots. Its probably impossible to come up with secure software, and at the least it would be extremely expensive. Its not a one-off cost, you'd constantly have to update it and fix it.
4. Not really effective. Relies on being able to distinguish bot behaviour from real people. Not a realistic long term solution.
5. Does nothing. You can make up people, or again if you're bots good enough its worth it to pay someone to pretend to play, while only doing what the bot says.
6. This could be gotten around.

All of your solutions rely on Bots not becoming really good at mimicking people, or on technology that would be "tamper proof". Its more than naive (its stupid) too make either of those assumptions. The reality is in time AI will be advanced enough that bots will be able to beat most human players. Thats all it will take to kill online poker.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]

All of your solutions rely on Bots not becoming really good at mimicking people, or on technology that would be "tamper proof". Its more than naive (its stupid) too make either of those assumptions. The reality is in time AI will be advanced enough that bots will be able to beat most human players. Thats all it will take to kill online poker.

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This is 100% true... as long as you have users who are connecting to a poker client through a insecure medium it is going to be prone to attack.
You can only really attempt to make it tamper proof because bots will be eventually able to defeat all statistical analysis that you can throw at it through the poker client.
However there are a few steps that the poker websites can take... the gaming industry has long dealt with this issue of "bots" and "hackers" reaking havok in almost any major online game out there and there method to fight back is called punkbuster however poker websites could go even further than that.
1)All of there traffic is and should always be relayed over an encrypted connection and should be monitored for any tampering which is a realistic thing to do today.
2)The system themselves should be monitered. This is the biggie and it involves screen captures and hardware identification. Sure you could have all of the input coming from another computer that is connected to yours through fancy hookups but the computers should always have a program running in the background watching the user for various things such as:
-weird 12 hour, no break 8 tabling sessions
-consistently winning players should be monitored more than losing players(who cares about a losing bot, but should still be monitered because it could improve)
-consistent changes in hardware, or hardware going undetected regularly
-"blue pill" (I think that's the correct phrase) the systems.. monitor for rootkits by becoming a rootkit.

Anything out of the ordinary, such as a user changing mice before and after every session should be logged... eventually they will become perfect and honestly, that will be the day that online poker dies but untill then you should hopefully be able to get enough information off of their computer to detect something out of the ordinary. Poker is a fickle game that is a statistical and "gut felling" game which will take a few senior level programers years to get a computer to understand, if they ever attempt it, I'm sure BBV will hear about it one way or another.
But then again there is monetary incentive to keep quite if you do produce a bot but humans make mistakes so we'll hear about it eventually... welcome to the golden age of online poker, it's not going to be here for much longer.
Eventually everybody here will end up stacking tourists in B&M casino's I guess.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Hey JJ, u dont need to be rude, I'm just putting some ideas on the table.I'm not advocating any one these ideas. Running bad lately ?

Some other ideas :

7 - Segregated Fish Tanks : Players are automaticaly seated at tables where the others players are at same skill level. Bots will eventually play each other.
8 - new poker variants
9 - No screennames and moving tables: You will be moved to other table after, lets say, 20 hands.You will be always playing against someone u dont have enough stats. I think, but I'm not sure , that a bot cant beat a good human player without a profile. A tie is the most probable outcome.

What we do understand today as multiplayer games may be obsolete in 5 years and new enviroments and devices could open new opprtunities to poker.

I think Public profiles may help to preserve fish from the big grinder bot. The fish must know that they are playing against someone who plays X hours/day and sees % of flops etc ...

About the item #4, Bots are VERY sensitive to collusion. Either explicit or implicit. We just need to say : " Hey guys player X is a bot" to make them a losing proposition.

I do agree that the grinder friendly online poker will be dead in a very near future.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

it seems to me that bots (ie, computers) are very good at numerical calculations and algorithms.

thus, if i was going to come up with an bot detection system, it'd need to be outside the realm of calculations and algorithms and the like.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Hey JJ, u dont need to be rude, I'm just putting some ideas on the table.I'm not advocating any one these ideas. Running bad lately ?

Some other ideas :

7 - Segregated Fish Tanks : Players are automaticaly seated at tables where the others players are at same skill level. Bots will eventually play each other.
8 - new poker variants
9 - No screennames and moving tables: You will be moved to other table after, lets say, 20 hands.You will be always playing against someone u dont have enough stats. I think, but I'm not sure , that a bot cant beat a good human player without a profile. A tie is the most probable outcome.

What we do understand today as multiplayer games may be obsolete in 5 years and new enviroments and devices could open new opprtunities to poker.

I think Public profiles may help to preserve fish from the big grinder bot. The fish must know that they are playing against someone who plays X hours/day and sees % of flops etc ...

About the item #4, Bots are VERY sensitive to collusion. Either explicit or implicit. We just need to say : " Hey guys player X is a bot" to make them a losing proposition.

I do agree that the grinder friendly online poker will be dead in a very near future.

[/ QUOTE ]


Sorry if I came across as rude. I think this is a good debate, and I'm not trying to be insulting. And interestingly enough I don't really play online. Basically because I know I'm not good enough to be any more than break even. I find live play more fun, and a lot easier to make money.

7. This would kill online poker. Poker is a giant pyramid scheme. There's a few great players who make money off of everybody. Then the next level makes money off of lots of people but loses it to the people above them, and down we go. At the bottom are the fish. The people that either know they lose money and don't care because they enjoy it, or the people that convince themselves that they're winning players but they aren't. (Note: This is another major threat to online poker. Its hard to convince yourself you're a winning player when you're not online. In real life its way easier to lose track of your actual wins/losses). On top of that, you could easily make your bot play bad enough that it would be the best of the bad players. If you can't tell the difference between humans and bots, you can't separate them into separate tables.

8. You'd have to convince players to play these new games. There's no reason to think that people could learn these games faster than bots (and plenty of reasons to believe bots could adjust faster).

9. Bots will definitely become good enough to adjust to the optimal strategy against unknown players.

Again, I'm not trying to be rude, this is just my writing style when I really believe what I'm writing. I could be wrong, but I see almost no situation where online poker can stay ahead of bots indefinitely.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

All of your solutions rely on Bots not becoming really good at mimicking people, or on technology that would be "tamper proof". Its more than naive (its stupid) too make either of those assumptions. The reality is in time AI will be advanced enough that bots will be able to beat most human players. Thats all it will take to kill online poker.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is 100% true... as long as you have users who are connecting to a poker client through a insecure medium it is going to be prone to attack.
You can only really attempt to make it tamper proof because bots will be eventually able to defeat all statistical analysis that you can throw at it through the poker client.
However there are a few steps that the poker websites can take... the gaming industry has long dealt with this issue of "bots" and "hackers" reaking havok in almost any major online game out there and there method to fight back is called punkbuster however poker websites could go even further than that.
1)All of there traffic is and should always be relayed over an encrypted connection and should be monitored for any tampering which is a realistic thing to do today.
2)The system themselves should be monitered. This is the biggie and it involves screen captures and hardware identification. Sure you could have all of the input coming from another computer that is connected to yours through fancy hookups but the computers should always have a program running in the background watching the user for various things such as:
-weird 12 hour, no break 8 tabling sessions
-consistently winning players should be monitored more than losing players(who cares about a losing bot, but should still be monitered because it could improve)
-consistent changes in hardware, or hardware going undetected regularly
-"blue pill" (I think that's the correct phrase) the systems.. monitor for rootkits by becoming a rootkit.

Anything out of the ordinary, such as a user changing mice before and after every session should be logged... eventually they will become perfect and honestly, that will be the day that online poker dies but untill then you should hopefully be able to get enough information off of their computer to detect something out of the ordinary. Poker is a fickle game that is a statistical and "gut felling" game which will take a few senior level programers years to get a computer to understand, if they ever attempt it, I'm sure BBV will hear about it one way or another.
But then again there is monetary incentive to keep quite if you do produce a bot but humans make mistakes so we'll hear about it eventually... welcome to the golden age of online poker, it's not going to be here for much longer.
Eventually everybody here will end up stacking tourists in B&M casino's I guess.

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I stated earlier that I think the bot-writers will win in the long run because of the very limited interface between the poker site and the player. Even in the best case for poker sites, I don't think they can overcome this problem. The best case is that they come up with a hardware/software solution that prevents any sort of access by bot software.

How can bot-writers overcome that? Set up a video camera to look at the screen and have it connected to a seperate machine (the bot) that connects to the machine with the poker software (poker host) only through the mouse interface ( whatever the future equivalent of USB will be). It would be easy to build such that the poker host can't distinguish it from any other mouse.

I'm quite confident that in 10 years we'll have image recognition advanced enough that any information displayed for a human user will be able to be processed by the bot machine. At this point it feeds its actions through its mouse interface and does what it needs to do.

Even if the "mouse interface" could be overcome by poker sites, it comes down to always being able to have a human being be the interface between the bot and the poker site. You pay someone $10/hour to do exactly what the bot tells you.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

The poker sites will always have enough money to hire better programmers or buy better technology than the bot builders. WOW does pretty good job against bots and there is much less money involved. When the poker sites feel they are losing money because people are afraid of bots they will find way to stop the current bots and get ahead of the curve. And really, no one is afraid of the guy who creates a Movie Plot bot to beat the game, that will never be popular enough to be a concern.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
Meh. Leave the drama bomb in the zoo. Withholding "ideas" that aren't implemented, and probably won't be implemented is silly. If the sites cared about the bot problem, if there is a bot problem, they would do something.

Off the top of my head I would think some kind of question written with the letters scrambled would be enough to mess up a bot. Not a captcha but a real, short answer question.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not only bots are not an issue currently, but they actually are good for the games.

The ask a question approach unfortunately will not work. While it will ban some fishes with IQ < 20, a good bot will make google search with the question, then look of which of the a,b,c,d answers (or whaever) on the site match best toward what is found in google.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
A captcha like phrase was developed for online forms etc and could be implemented in a software for a site, but it might get annoying. I saw a captcha on a site last night that if I were color blind, would have been impossible to determine.

Only way I can think of that might be pretty close to untouchable would be to somehow determine if a keypress or mouse click came from a software interrupt or a hardware interrupt. If it was software it would simply be discarded. Without being a deep layer Windows API guru I can't tell you if it would be possible or not but if it were, that would solve it immediatley I would think. Don't believe you can fake a hardware interrupt from software without causing the kernel to go wacky.

I could be wrong.

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You can't do that. If the bots are run in VMWare, and the click is from the host PC you get 1:1 a user behaviour.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
It is dreaming. Current OCR and image processing is so powerful the level of "smearing" necessary for a computer to mess up would make it totally unreadable for the human players.

Just look at how complex current CAPTCHAs have to be in order to fool the bots.

And while messing around with the card images and making them harder to modify would certainly be a good step to prevent casual bot makers, slightly more complex software would easily handle it.

dave's idea up there seems pretty bullet-proof, but of course nobody would play on a system like that.

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Which is actually quite bad idea to go for, do you agree (i.e. it is the script kiddies that bring masses of losing bots and by stopping them, the only bots left will be the real consistent winners, as if a programmer have huge winner, he will spend the neccessary time to avoid any anti-detection).

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

All of your solutions rely on Bots not becoming really good at mimicking people, or on technology that would be "tamper proof". Its more than naive (its stupid) too make either of those assumptions. The reality is in time AI will be advanced enough that bots will be able to beat most human players. Thats all it will take to kill online poker.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is 100% true... as long as you have users who are connecting to a poker client through a insecure medium it is going to be prone to attack.
You can only really attempt to make it tamper proof because bots will be eventually able to defeat all statistical analysis that you can throw at it through the poker client.
However there are a few steps that the poker websites can take... the gaming industry has long dealt with this issue of "bots" and "hackers" reaking havok in almost any major online game out there and there method to fight back is called punkbuster however poker websites could go even further than that.
1)All of there traffic is and should always be relayed over an encrypted connection and should be monitored for any tampering which is a realistic thing to do today.
2)The system themselves should be monitered. This is the biggie and it involves screen captures and hardware identification. Sure you could have all of the input coming from another computer that is connected to yours through fancy hookups but the computers should always have a program running in the background watching the user for various things such as:
-weird 12 hour, no break 8 tabling sessions
-consistently winning players should be monitored more than losing players(who cares about a losing bot, but should still be monitered because it could improve)
-consistent changes in hardware, or hardware going undetected regularly
-"blue pill" (I think that's the correct phrase) the systems.. monitor for rootkits by becoming a rootkit.

Anything out of the ordinary, such as a user changing mice before and after every session should be logged... eventually they will become perfect and honestly, that will be the day that online poker dies but untill then you should hopefully be able to get enough information off of their computer to detect something out of the ordinary. Poker is a fickle game that is a statistical and "gut felling" game which will take a few senior level programers years to get a computer to understand, if they ever attempt it, I'm sure BBV will hear about it one way or another.
But then again there is monetary incentive to keep quite if you do produce a bot but humans make mistakes so we'll hear about it eventually... welcome to the golden age of online poker, it's not going to be here for much longer.
Eventually everybody here will end up stacking tourists in B&M casino's I guess.

[/ QUOTE ]

Guys,
you need to understand that the only thing that all these measures do is to stop the mass framework, script kiddies, scam based and so on LOSING bots. All these things are very easy to counter, they are ignorably easy compared to the time a guy have already spend on building a profitable winning bot.

I don't want to go further illustrating this, but there are currently very good examples of this effect.

Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?
 

Its naive to assume that script kiddies will always have bad bots. At some point code for a bot AI will be released that is better than the vast majority of humans. At this point online poker dies.