This article practically rips off my article as well as an article I cited in that post, which I submitted earlier this week. If you put both articles side-by-side, they have the same structure and a fairly similar approach to the problem. While this could be a coincidence (and honestly, I don’t care), I’m still a little miffed that the author didn’t bother to cite his inspiration.<p>The post in question:<p><a href="https://applecrazy.github.io/blog/posts/protect-trivia-from-bots/" rel="nofollow">https://applecrazy.github.io/blog/posts/protect-trivia-from-...</a><p>Proof:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944171" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944171</a>
It is important to note that trying to hide from OCR systems is not the right approach here. The text displayed in the game is coming from the network, and I highly doubt it's hard to MiTM from your own device.<p>The other mitigations are more reasonable.
Back in the dotcom craze, there was a company trying to promote their internet currency. Think Flooz or Beenz, although it was neither one of those. Let's call it iDollars.<p>To promote their currency, they had a variety of games you could play to earn small amounts of currency. One was a trivia game. My friends and I wrote a perl script to play the game, guess an answer, and whenever it guessed right, remember that combination for next time.<p>We ran the bot 24/7. The real coup was throttling the bot so we were never the top earner in any day; we aimed to be approximately in tenth place every day. That managed to keep our gains plausible.<p>As the dotcom bubble exploded, there was less and less you could do with iDollars. Eventually someone at iDollar caught on and we eventually got a cease-and-desist letter telling us to stop, although the let us keep our spoils. My one friend managed to trade in his remaining iDollars for like 250 iDollar promotional golf towels, right before the company went under for good. I wonder if he still has them.
> Although seemingly insignificant, the right-side UI is actually harder for the Tesseract OCR Engine to parse, since the colors are less distinct.<p><i>shrug</i>, all the while making it harder for humans to see, too. All of these suggestions move the goal posts a bit and set things up for a cat-and-mouse game.<p>I applaud Cognetta's effort but sadly I think we are heading for a future where artificially intelligent agents will ruin fun things like this.
I've done digging of my own to do the same Google search tricks and found that you can just connect to a websocket and get a live stream of the questions, possible answers as well as every chat message in the feed. OCR not required.<p>I was also considering using the chat messages to get the answer. People are either going to mostly say the right answer to sound smart or mostly send the wrong answers to try to trick people. Keep track of which is most common and you have an additional datapoint.
He really didn't show how it performs or the actual solution running on a screen. The time you have to answer the question is very short and his solution has to work against 1) Latency of OCR 2) Latency of the Google Query 3) Latency of parsing the result 4) Latency of running the three methods 5) Input of the Answer (which needs to be performed by a human reading reading the output from the computer screen).<p>Can someone confirm if it's possible to do all these in Python in l second or less?
Was wondering when I'd see a post like this...<p><a href="https://github.com/nbclark/hqcheat/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nbclark/hqcheat/</a><p>Interestingly, we seemed to end up with all 3 of the same approaches. Was fun while it lasted
<i>"Trivia bots and clever hackers will be no issue for the platform’s rapid growth, as long as HQ makes a few critical adjustments."</i><p>Really, pretty much every CAPTCHA has been solved with deep learning now. The mitigations this guy gives can be trivially overcome.<p>What a game like Trivia HQ does is give a monetary incentive to build better trivia AI. Hi Watson!
Also, for iOS devs, remember that you can detect mirroring, and even display a different UI on the "external" screen. In the case of HQ, you could <i>enhance</i> UX by putting the @traptrebek on the external screen while the question stays on the phone.
It's amazing that trivia games are still so hot in mobile. They were very popular 10-15 years ago as well though running via premium SMS and scamy subscriptions