The post in question:
https://applecrazy.github.io/blog/posts/protect-trivia-from-...
I'm really sorry that the work seems like it plagiarizes yours. I started this project as soon as HQ Trivia came out, and I did not see your article until reading this comment.
A few other comments on this thread show that others (e.g. https://github.com/nbclark/hqcheat/) also implemented very similar techniques, so it seems that this may just be a "great minds think alike" situation :/.
I'd love to support your article as well, as I love your format and videos! Let me know if you'd like to talk about plagiarism, would love for us to talk directly instead of on comments.
To think that two (or three or a dozen) clever engineers couldn't independently look at one of the most popular mobile apps and think "I can game this" is silly.
edit: fwiw your post is more fleshed out and better, but OP had some interesting approaches to using the Search API for quick responses to the difficult class of questions. I feel bad for missing your original post
I have three techniques that i've implemented so far - the first is similar to what the two of you did with screenshots and OCR. The second is MITM based, and the third is probably the most interesting since it has a higher success rate and is much more difficult to defend against.
I started when it was 30k viewers per session but now it is up to almost a million and the lag has been bad
I might eventually publish some info - but I was interested also in the challenge of how you would defend against these schemes as HQ will need to be on the ball. I can imagine that, in the long-term, cheating will become a big problem and a competitive advantage they could have over the clone apps is the ability to guarantee to contestants that they're playing against other humans rather than against machines.
I believe that there are successful cheaters at the moment because the ratio of winners to participants (especially later stage participants) has worsened. I don't have enough hard data to prove that and it's mostly anecdotal but obtaining the data to back up that hypothesis shouldn't be too difficult (there used to be regular $100+ wins, today the win rate feels an order of magnitude higher)
Publicly claiming someone has ripped off your work is a pretty strong allegation and I don't see any basis for it.
If a problem can be summarized in a few simple steps, then how different do you expect any posts about the topic to be?
Code open sourced, and auto updating website every time I use the script
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15832124 jakemor.com/hq
I wonder how often this happens to people ...
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/i-made-thi...
The other mitigations are more reasonable.
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.
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.
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.
shrug, 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.
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 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.
I doubt you'd have much success with this approach because how "correct" the group is, as a whole, changes every question. There's no way to know if the chat group is well-informed or not until the question is over and you see how many people were correct.
Can someone confirm if it's possible to do all these in Python in l second or less?
https://github.com/nbclark/hqcheat/
Interestingly, we seemed to end up with all 3 of the same approaches. Was fun while it lasted
Really, pretty much every CAPTCHA has been solved with deep learning now. The mitigations this guy gives can be trivially overcome.
What a game like Trivia HQ does is give a monetary incentive to build better trivia AI. Hi Watson!
