Game bot prevention?

[Enygma]

I was wondering if there are any measures in place to prevent programmers from writing programs that automatically solve these puzzles. I don't plan on doing this, but I am an experienced programmer and after just taking a glance at your source code it seems to me that such a program could be written without great difficulty. I would understand if this is simply not a priority since no prizes or awards are offered by this website.

~ Mr. E

[admin]

Hi Enigma -

There are some criteria in place that can detect and/or prevent such activity, but its far from foolproof. If folks want to cheat they will more than likely find a way.

Our detection scripts do, however, flag accounts which are deemed to be "suspicious" on the backend, so that in future upgrades they'll be ineligible for certain prizes and competitions.

[Wol]

There are some criteria in place that can detect and/or prevent such activity, but its far from foolproof. If folks want to cheat they will more than likely find a way.

After finding boggled.org, I thought it would be an interesting programming exercise to code a boggle solver. Ive been writing the interface, which manages to login, start games, and submit words, but as soon as I get to the gameover.php stage, I am always getting the " Already played" error message coming up. The gameid is passed correctly, I have all the same cookies in the session, ive even timed the 123 seconds between it loading play.php and before loading gameover.php, yet it still throws me to the error page. Any ideas at all?

Can you also mark my account as suspicious/ and not for participating in any competitions or prizes. Im using this site purely for recreational use and am not aiming to beat other people for best scores or totals.

Thanks :-)

[Wol]

Nope. Im just an idiot! Got a character wrong in the request.

In the last 10 games ive played ive only put in one or so test words, so I have a fantastic average score! heh.

[Master of Noodles]

Lol, wol, I was wondering where the 1011 points came from :eek:

[Wol]

heh. that one did have a lot of wierd words in it. well as you can see, my program worked! yay. althoguh the current dictionary lookup is the dirtest way in the world (if this means anything to anyone: im regexing the word out of one long string with the dictionary in!!). guna make a proper tree structure soon.

[poslfit]

Try a DAWG, not a tree. I admit I'll use regexps too though sometimes, if I don't have time to code it properly, and if you use Perl's study() function, it's not even that much slower for some tasks.

[Wol]

Im guessing youre talking about something like: http://www.wutka.com/dawg.html

As far as i can tell, its very similar to the way im actually going through the boggle grid currently.

Yet the largest delay in the program is still the time it takes to send the requests to the server submitting a word!

[admin]

Hi folks -

It'd be a big help if you held off on hitting our server with bot-scripts for the next few days... we're running heavy on our already tapped resources which has caused the site to go down twice this afternoon.

If you want to email me at admin@boggled.org I can share with you the methods I used to build the script solver that we employ on this site. Maybe it'll help you with your project. It can solve a puzzle with 100% accuracy in just under a second.

Cheers -

- Stephen