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19 Articles

CAPTCHA Bot Beats New Are You A Human PlayThru Game

May 25, 2012 by 27 Comments

What do you put on your pancakes? Butter and syrup but not a pair of shoes? This makes sense to us, and it’s the premise of the new CAPTCHA game PlayThru. The space that is normally filled by nearly illegible text is now taken up by a little graphic-based game where you drag the appropriate items to one part of the screen. In addition to being easier than deciphering letters, this new platform shouldn’t require localization. But alas, it seems the system is already broken. [Stephen] sent us a link to a bot that can pass the PlayThru CAPTCHA.

Take a look at the video after the break to see the four test-runs. It looks like the bot is just identifying the movable objects and trying them out. Sometimes this is quick, sometimes not. But it does eventually succeed. For the PlayThru developers this should be pretty easy to fix, just make an error limit for trying the wrong item. At any rate, we can’t think defeating the current system is nearly as hard as defeating reCaptcha was.

Update: [Tyler] over at Are You A Human wrote in to share their side of this story. Apparently we’re seeing the bot play the game, but not necessarily pass it. It isn’t until the game if finished and the playing information is sent to their servers that a decision is made on whether it is successful or not. This way they can change the authentication parameters from the server side at any time.

At the same time, [Stephen] updated his bot and made a video of it playing the game without any shoes on the pancakes.

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Web Game Bot Coded With Python

February 7, 2012 by 15 Comments

We find the programming challenge of game-playing bots to be fascinating. Take a look at this Python bot which plays Burrito Bison all the way through (video after the break). This is a totally pedantic exercise which has no purpose, other than to hone your mastery of a certain programming problem. And to that we say Bravo!

We looked in on a similar project which used some C# code to dominate the game Bejeweled Blitz. We’re not fantastic at C# and that code was never made public. But [Audionatics] has released this code through Github, and it’s written in Python which is a language in which we’re well versed.

The script monitors pixel locations to use as an input, which [Audionautics] admits is very error-prone. But if everything is setup just right it works like a charm. He’s also using the PyWin package which we believe is what lets the script move the cursor and register button clicks. We think this is really fun, but it make us wonder about the black-hat possibilities. What are the chances this could be turned into a gambling bot? Scary thought, huh?

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Bejeweled Blitz Bot Makes Your High Score Look Just Sad

July 30, 2011 by 48 Comments

Programmers don’t need to get good at a game to achieve a high score, they code a bot for that instead. Take [hypnotizd] for instance. He was learning to write in the C# language and decided to make a bot that plays Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. He figures he took between 48 and 72 hours of coding over a couple of weeks, but remember, he was learning the language at the same time. We think you’d be hard pressed to achieve a 1.5 million range score by yourself, even with that amount of practice time.

We spoke with [hypnotizd] yesterday afternoon to get a bit of background on how he made this happen. His code (he’s not releasing it so you’ll have to write your own) scrapes the screen image as input. You can see at the beginning of the video after the break that he sizes his app to properly align each jewel in its grid. The program then identifies each game piece by finding the center of the cell and taking a 25 square-pixel average color. Many of the jewels are easily recognized in this first pass, but some are harder and require several different tests to identify. That’s the difficult part, choosing the best move is just a matter of coming up with your own rules on how the bot should play the game.

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BAMF2011: Google’s SKPR Bot, Not For Arachnophobes

May 23, 2011 by 10 Comments

Google’s Maker Faire exhibit space is swarmed with robots…er, androids. Amidst some cool bipeds and Segway-balancers, our inner sci-fi nerd was most smitten with this hexapod design, which they’ve dubbed SKPR Bot. The “Skipper” is on hand to showcase the ease of various Google technologies: SketchUp, Android OS and the Android Open Accessory Development Kit. The whole project came together in less than six weeks.

18 servos are mounted to a framework designed in SketchUp and laser-cut by Ponoko. The low-level servo PWM control is handled by the Dev Kit (essentially a rebadged Arduino Mega, as we’ve seen), while an Android OS phone provides a slick GUI and handles all the inverse kinematics calculations required as the robot takes each step. The coolest bit is that it’s all up for grabs. At this moment you’ll have to scrounge around the ’net a bit to find the plans and code, but some time post-Faire they plan to bring everything together at the SKPR Bot site.

Air Freshener Hacking

July 27, 2010 by 34 Comments

In an effort to improve his marital standing [Tech B] hacked an air freshener to make it Internet controllable. The main component here is a Glade Sense and Spray. It cost him $7 and is meant to spray out some sweet smells when it senses motion in the room. The unit also has a manual spray button which he patched into with the help of a relay. From there some Arduino code and an IRC bot take over, letting him unleash freshness from anywhere he has IRC access.

When reading about this we were also thinking: “motion sensing circuitry available at local stores for just $7?”. We may have to conduct an investigation into the alternative usefulness of that package.

If you have another brand of automatic freshener around it should be just as easy to hack as this one was.