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Old 05-24-2007, 12:25 AM
erbbysam erbbysam is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: life rewards bold&aggro moves
Posts: 314
Default Re: Can You Write a Sure-fire Algorithm to Stop Bots?

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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.
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