Building a Bejeweled Bot

Very interesting. I'm also very interested in making bots to automate various web games, in my case casino games.

When I was in college, I came across a gambling strategy for online roulette. I tested it for a few weeks but I gave up on it as it was extremely boring and tedious, even though it seems legitimately profitable. A few years later I heard about bots that automate poker and so on, so I looked at tools that I could use to code up the roulette strategy to play it automatically. I looked into AutoIt and wrote some scripts, but the code ended up being beyond my ability to write, as my knowledge of AutoIt starting out was zero. Even a relatively simple game like roulette (only 37 supposedly random possible outcomes on a European roulette table) ended up having bot logic that was quite complex.

However a few weeks ago I came across this excellent article:

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/workflow/how-to-build-a...

So I looked at re-writing the bot in Python instead. Turns out that writing it in Python is FAR simpler than AutoIt, and the code far simpler to figure out. Even though I had close to zero knowledge of Python starting out (learning Python really quickly by using it to build a real project, rather than learning Python theory first.) Now my bot is about 90% complete, just a couple of steps away from having a working (potentially profitable) bot.

Really cool what you can do in a few weeks in Python from a standing start.

I had a go at something similar for the Facebook version a couple of years ago. My main goal was to stop playing the game, but it was also an excuse to try Clojure. At the time it absolutely thrashed my best scores, though I'm sure it won't work with the updates the developers have made since then.

I think it was the first thing I wrote that drove home the power of having a REPL for exploratory programming:

https://gist.github.com/490689

I would recommend using AutoHotkey instead of AutoIt. I wrote some bots for fun for a few similar games but skipped Bejeweled in favor of (a simpler) alternative called Diamond Dash. The bot could hold its own but it couldn't beat some of my better friends. To squeeze out the extra performance one has to start doing much more complicated things. For example, the blocks in these games rarely appear in fixed coordinates but slide around, explode (and therefore partially occlude other tiles), etc. Recently, this has been turning into a bit of a cat and mouse game with game developers. For example, they started adding noise on top of sprites to throw off very simple methods.

But there is something very fun in developing scripts that moves your mouse around and play for you. I like that game much better :)

Interesting post, a few friends and I did something similar in Java/C# a while back. It's surprisingly easy to automate, and very satisfying to see working.