What happens when a Social Game - is run with Bots? | Hacker News Reader

What happens when a Social Game - is run with Bots?

rothy.tumblr.com

77 pointswin_ini18 comments

This would be a great science fiction story with the hook that he's a sim of an actual person created to participate in social games

Your comment made me think of the film "The Thirteenth Floor"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

Made me think of this: http://qntm.org/difference

Thanks for the link! It also made me think of that but I couldn't find it back.

Reverse Ender's Game.

Note: A friend just pointed out the explanation for this behaviour on Tetris Battle's help area which is helpful to understand what may have happened:

All of the games with a Facebook name and profile picture are real game plays from the actual player. If the server is unable to find a player, then the title AI will appear on the opponent’s name to tell you that it is an AI bot playing against you.

I should note - that in my screen shot, there is no indication of it being a replay though.

A friend of mine tried to do a statistics project on the algorithm. Made the interesting discovery that the blocks are randomized within 7-piece sets, with the system going through each different tetramino before repeating any one.

I believe that this feature is generally known as 'Grab Bag.' In a Tetris implementation where tetraminos are sampled uniformly, the player is guaranteed to lose. Given a sufficiently long run of Z or S blocks it's impossible to make any lines. Grab Bag eliminates these pathological runs. It also provides an upper bound on the maximum time between see identical blocks at 13 and can make for a better play experience.

Hm. I should clarify. Runs of Z or S don't prevent lines, but they do guarantee that you'll always leave an eye. It is the accumulated eyes that prevent line formation and lead to a loss.

This is how all officially licensed Tetris games are required to generate blocks.

http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator

Very interesting! Just curious - How did he scrape the different moves? The 7-piece sets arei nteresting, because I noticed certain patterns emerge when playing against others, but didn't try to identify them.

The stock market?

Zwok is a Flash multiplayer shooter that I enjoyed and thought that I was great at until I found that I could play it without an Internet connection.

I used to play Zwok a lot. Are you saying the opponents are bots, always? If so, some of them are really good (and some, horrible).

In the first Block Battle thread, someone noted[1] that the individual matches are often just replays of past games. At the higher levels (around 20+) you can actually randomly play against the AI, but this is at least a little more honest, as its name is A.I., and it goes very fast.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2389740

Related: If you want to play only with real humans, try Block Battle http://blockbattle.net/

Out of curiosity, how do you make sure only real people are playing?

Because his bot is not that good and it still beat them all.

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