Making Pizza with Python | Hacker News Reader

Making Pizza with Python

slowfrog.blogspot.com

51 pointsprog11 comments

If anyone's interested in doing something similar in Java or another JVM language, check out the AWT Robot[1]. It's one of those hidden gems of the Java API.

[1] http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/Robot....

I tend to do similar things with the games that I play, including Farmville. Once I've figured out the optimal strategy for things, I find that it's much more interesting to code it up, rather than go through the motions.

Some people consider it cheating, but I consider it more 'taking advantage of suboptimal game design', ie. if I can script it, it's likely not a very interesting game in the first place.

I assume by "if I can script it" you mean strategy? Every single computer game can be scripted, and most have - including poker, complex MMOs, complex RTS games, etc.

I doubt you'd find many people that'd agree that having a program play the game for you isn't cheating, no matter how boring you might find the game.

Well, perhaps rephrase that to "If I can script it with less effort than it takes to play the game..." Farmville is a case in point - they have shiny stuff like tractors to take the tedium out of playing... :\

How about they write a decent game where I have to make complex decisions in the first place, rather than clicking on buttons over and over? I wrote a fairly involved rant about it a while back: http://blog.oarsum.com/post/255516489/cheating-and-game-desi...

RoboGamer uses the same interfaces human uses (i.e. video and a joystick) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vH62EEfH6E

There was another project, vArashi, to achieve similar, circa 2001.

And probably you remember rogomatic...

Very interesting programming project. I'll have to give that a try sometime.

For day-to-day automation of stuff, I like to use sikuli [1] which lets you automate pretty much anything in a gui using screenshots. (Their editor is pretty cool). It's a research project so a bit rough around the edges, but still worth your time to check it out if you're at all interested in automation (auto-configuring systems, driving applications, playing flash games, etc)

[1] http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/

Seriously, you shouldn't have posted this. My weekends are busy enough without building gambling bots too ;)

Could anyone upload a vid? I don't run Windows.

amazing work. Now for the pokerbot...

Yep, that's where the AI comes in. The screen-scraping is the easy part.

The University of Alberta has a research group devoted to the problem: http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/

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