How do we know we're not playing bots?

rsliu · #1 08-15-2005, 02:14 PM

Sometimes when I'm on party I like to talk to the other players, because I play pretty tight and in an effort to improve my game I'm not multitabling either, so there's a lot of down time. Most people are responsive, but sometimes I get people who don't say anything.

I'm wondering, is there any way for either myself or party to tell if these people are bots? For me, I would have to design some sort of Turing test for poker bothood. Does anyone know of something like this?

For party, its a different story. I looked through the fine print of party's terms and conditions and read somewhere that party can take screenshots of your desktop and look through the active processes that are running. But let's suppose a crafty programmer designs a bot and calls the bot "Microsoft Word 2003", and then minimizes it so that you can't see it on the screenshot and the process shows up as "Winword". How would party be able to detect this? Or, what if a programmer had 2 computers, ran party on one computer, and then used VNC with the bot software on the other computer? All that would show up in the processes is a VNC server, which looks harmless. Does party have more sophisticated defenses? Or are we doomed to face the possibility of playing against bot players?

MyMindIsGoing · #2 08-15-2005, 02:16 PM

As long as you are winning, what does it matter who is on the other side?

#3 08-15-2005, 02:50 PM

you don't know if you are playing a bot. They don't either, they can do things to make it harder for a bot to sweep the screen, if that is what it is doing, like change the fonts or place where the graphics come up. I think in the 5 and 10 dollar game, the bots could do well...especially in limit holdem where it is more like bingo.

#4 08-16-2005, 01:22 PM

[ QUOTE ]
especially in limit holdem where it is more like bingo.

[/ QUOTE ]

keep telling yourself that, donkey.

rsliu · #5 08-16-2005, 02:22 PM

Seriously though, is party doing anything to stop this? If not there'll be thousands of undergrad CS majors gunning for them.

K C · #6 08-16-2005, 04:06 PM

I wouldn't worry too much about bots. The major ones out there are being targetted and while you may run into a few that aren't, they are only as good as the programmer. All bots do basically is allow the player to play a lot more tables without actually watching them. There is a price for this though as they don't adjust in the same way we do and once you get a read on the thing you can take advantage of it pretty easily.

KC