Preventing Poker AI

[CardBlunt]

FYI: Copy of mail sent to PartyPoker. Comments welcome!

[ QUOTE ]

Hi guys,


For the attention of your technical team!


The increasing use of programs such as **** to automatically play sites is a worry to me - particularly as these programs are getting harder to detect as they increase their sophistication (using such techniques as screen-scraping terminal server sessions).


I had a great idea that will enable you to detect these programs with a dramatically increased success rate. Of course it would require an investment in development effort on your part, but I imagine being able to advertise yourself as "The Most Poker AI Resistant" site would be of value.


The idea is to use the anti-spam technique employed by sites like Yahoo and AOL. You periodically prompt players to enter numbers or letters displayed in a graphically distorted image which is almost impossible to read by OCR techniques. If a correct answer is not given inside a fixed number of attempts you can boot the player from the table - and track the failed answers and response times to increase the question interval for suspicious accounts.


With regard to the harm to the experience of genuine players, I am sure that if you explain why you are doing this, most players would welcome the feature. I suppose a worry would be that you are making players who are not aware of this problem or not concerned by it more concerned - but I suspect this problem is only going to get worse and needs to be acknowledged at some point.


Regards,


****



[/ QUOTE ]

CardBlunt

[BlueBear]

Bad idea, it will make the fishies even more aware and paranoid about online poker bots and scare them away.

[CardBlunt]

Yeah, I thought that as an issue. Although in the internet age the fishies are going to be aware at large before too long, so I guess eventually some form of preventative measure will provide more comfort than it adds fear... maybe not just yet though.

CardBlunt

[BlueBear]

Until the pokerbots finally really start to affect the online games and until the media starts making a big hoo-hah about pokerbots, it's best to leave the fishies alone in their state of ignorant bliss and generosity.

[GuyOnTilt]

Until the pokerbots finally really start to affect the online games and until the media starts making a big hoo-hah about pokerbots, it's best to leave the fishies alone in their state of ignorant bliss and generosity.

How is this better than making attempts to solve the problem before it starts affecting games, i.e. making them tougher, and before the mainstream media directs attention toward it prompting skilled programmers to notice how much money is to be made in it?

GoT

[BlueBear]

It's my opinion that fishies freely flock to the online games as many of them are completely unaware and do not care of the threat of poker bots. I feel that these fishies will be scared off if they get the slightest hint or a suggestion that poker bots do exist. Most casual fishies I know don't even know the a computer can play poker. If asked, they would say, "Computers playing poker? Bah. Nonsense. The game is all about luck, psychology, bluffing and putting a decent poker face. Hey I CAN do that!".

[jrz1972]

[ QUOTE ]
It's my opinion that fishies freely flock to the online games as many of them are completely unaware and do not care of the threat of poker bots. I feel that these fishies will be scared off if they get the slightest hint or a suggestion that poker bots do exist. Most casual fishies I know don't even know the a computer can play poker. If asked, they would say, "Computers playing poker? Bah. Nonsense. The game is all about luck, psychology, bluffing and putting a decent poker face. Hey I CAN do that!".

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree. Given the number of people who think that Party Poker is rigged, I don't think we need to do anything to add to the paranoia level of less sophisticated players.

[soooted]

[ QUOTE ]
The idea is to use the anti-spam technique employed by sites like Yahoo and AOL. You periodically prompt players to enter numbers or letters displayed in a graphically distorted image which is almost impossible to read by OCR techniques. If a correct answer is not given inside a fixed number of attempts you can booEnd response times to increase the question interval for suspicious accounts.

[/ QUOTE ]
There is easy way to defeat this - using the same techniques that the MMORPG guys used to create bot farms. In the MMORPG world, admins would talk to suspected bots (ala Turing test). This caught the amateur bots, but the
sophisticated bots just IM'ed the bot operator. The bot operator would respond either from computer or cell phone and continue to the conversation. With my Treo or a T-Mobile Sidekick I could use this same technique to bypass the image detector.

Also, I believe it's very possible to build an neural network to properly detect the letters being presented. The problem set is a lot easier than most people think b/c the known universe of characters is well defined (i.e. all alphanumeric chars). All that is required is sufficient set of sample images which can be easily obtained. Trust me on this one - I've had a lot of experience in image recognition and neural networks. All those Yahoo/AOL etc. programs do is fool the typical HTML script/crawler/redirector/content hijackers.

[GrannyMae]

The idea is to use the anti-spam technique employed by sites like Yahoo and AOL. You periodically prompt players to enter numbers or letters displayed in a graphically distorted image which is almost impossible to read by OCR techniques. If a correct answer is not given inside a fixed number of attempts you can boot the player from the table - and track the failed answers and response times to increase the question interval for suspicious accounts.

table chat:

fish 1: what's with this new pop-up thing i have to deal with
fish 2: yeah. wtf is that?
bigmouthtrout: that's to make sure you are a human and not bot
fish 1: bot?
fish 2: you mean i am playing against machines here?

1 month later;
bigmouthtrout: why am i sitting here alone?


party shareholders:
why did you put that st00pid pop-up prompter in there? will work for food