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

[TreyOfLight]

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.

[nuclear500]

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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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and the most excruciatingly annoying thing to look at constantly.

[jjshabado]

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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.

[Tatarana]

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.

[nuclear500]

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"

[kerowo]

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.

[DWarrior]

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.

[Grasshopp3r]

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.

[jjshabado]

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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.

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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.

[erbbysam]

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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.