[jjshabado]

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


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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.

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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.