Datamining Bandersnatch | Hacker News Reader

Datamining Bandersnatch

blog.thecybershadow.net

173 pointsarunc14 comments

Ha! My brother and I tried watching all the variations of Bandersnatch that we could, assuming there wouldn’t be very many and that we’d see all possible clips after 3 or 4 watchings. We got impatient after 3 times through and quit, but still guessed we’d almost covered every possibility. Looks like we were pretty wrong about our guess.

I watched refusing to make any decisions and waited for the timer to run out and force Netflix to go with their default.

I'm pretty sure that it just walks through every branch and I eventually got to a final spot where it wanted me to put in a special code and when I didn't it finally ended. So I think I only missed one ending by doing nothing at all.

if the article is correct and it didn't take you a few days, you probably missed a lot more than one ending.

I wonder what the authoring software is like?

(I hope for Inform 7 for movies... )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7

I believe it was made with Twine:

https://www.konbini.com/en/techandinnovation/twine-free-tool...

http://twinery.org/

They made the first prototypes/scripts for Bandersnatch in Twine, but they later moved to a Netflix-internal tool called "Branch Manager".

Cool, thank you both.

Inform 7 is interesting, but I never really liked coding in it; I feel like its almost-natural-English-but—not-quite syntax falls into a sort of “uncanny valley” of programming. Because of how much like natural language it is, it always feels like you should be able to write things in a lot more ways than you actually can.

Sounds a bit like AppleScript.

So the author took the JSON/video file provided by Netflix and reverse engineered the encoding and ran it on a Netflix player emulator?

No. They pulled all the logic out, converted to truth tables, and generated a flowchart of the entire game. In doing so they uncovered some interesting bugs like unreachable content and incorrect logic expressions. Yes they used a player emulator in the process to verify their work.

That sounds like reverse engineering the encoding and running it on an emulator.

Perhaps. I interpreted your comment as asking about the actual video encoding. The focus of this write up is about interpreting the accompanying logic associated with the clips of video. My point is to make it clear that this is not just an “I played Bandersnatch on an emulator” post which would be rather boring IMO.

Ah, okay, I meant "reverse engineered the [JSON] encoding [of the gameplay logic] and ran [the video] on an emulator [to interpret the state]".

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