Automating Threes [video] | Hacker News Reader

Automating Threes [video]

twitch.tv

66 pointsfelixmo11 comments

Hey everyone! I wrote the robot integration here, but not the AI core, which was https://twitter.com/waltdestler . He's going to write up a piece on his AI stuff at some point soon. I'm actually not super familiar with it, despite hooking into it, so I can't speak too much about it.

The physical integration is pretty simple. I'm using libimobiledevice to get a screenshot over the cable: http://www.libimobiledevice.org/ . Recognizing the board isn't very hard.

An Arduino and Adafruit motor shield are controlling two stepper motors with cardboard/tinfoil arms. Stepper motors are important because they won't drift over time.

The AI gets 3k tiles ~30% of its games, and 6k tiles ~3% of the time. These are simulated games--currently the robot is streaming its 5th complete game.

Are there plans to release the simulator you used to train the AI? I was thinking it would be fun to mess around, but building out a simulator or all the tools needed to drive Threes in a VM would be a pain.

Walt is planning on doing a blog post with some source code tomorrow, I think!

I felt good that my top score was higher than the machine's failure point.. then it swiped to its top score of 205,824 and I realized how woefully inadequate my feeble human mind truly is.

It is cool and fun, but I really wanted to see his AI code. :/

It looked like whoever was in charge of the bot was debugging a bit earlier. He/she might be tweaking things between games.

This is only remotely related, but I figured this might be worthwhile.

I was an everyday Twitch consumer, but I practically stopped watching it overnight. Not because I don't enjoy the content anymore, but because my Chromium crashes every time it tries to load Flash.

Now, while this shows how lazy I can be in this regard, this is also a great insight. Sure, I could just fire up Firefox or even try to fix the Flash issue, but this is one step too much for my taste.

From watching Twitch everyday to watching practically never, only because of this issue.

So if you spend months developing an application and say to yourself "The user just has to do the little step X to fully enjoy my work...", I'd beg you to reconsider. Sometimes, the smallest friction can stop a user.

archived videos :

http://www.twitch.tv/teamcolorblind/b/517016772

http://www.twitch.tv/teamcolorblind/b/517126107

This should be marked with a [video] if not [video stream] tag.

Marked it, thanks for the suggestion.

"You missed it."

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