5 ms·

I remember this from years back. A friend of mine came up with a fantastic strategy based around the fact that shot strength was a float that could be modified

by nlnn 4y ago

I remember this from years back. A friend of mine came up with a fantastic strategy based around the fact that shot strength was a float that could be modified. He used this to have his team fire extremely weak shots at each other, with the value of the float encoding different messages. He then used these to co-ordinate his bots against the enemy as a team, instead of individuals.

tra3 4y ago
Brilliant. I thought about game of life that had such simple rules but amazing emergent behaviour. No surprise that something as sophisticated as tank wars has strategies never anticipated by the original creators.
nwiswell 4y ago
What stops this kind of coordination from being used to smuggle an arbitrary massively parallel workload onto the system? :o)
- zachrip 4y ago
  What stops you from using discord messages as a database? :p I really enjoy this type of stuff though, is there a term for it? A while back after skype got rid of their sdk I was annoyed that the app didn't unfurl gifs. So I reverse engineered their api for sending/updating messages and I realized you could update a message that contained a file. The only problem was the file had to be on their servers or a client wouldn't display it. So I reverse engineered the ios app as well to find a way to get a file on their servers (I don't recall why I couldn't do it from the web api). After that I had two things: a way to get files on their servers, and an api to update messages. So I took each frame of a gif, uploaded to their servers, and then used the api to update the message at the rate of the gif. Of course there will be people making discord bots out there laughing at how simple this sounds, but the combination of reverse engineering as well as applying that to affect a new feature in the app I thought was pretty novel.
  - gs17 4y ago
    > What stops you from using discord messages as a database? :p I really enjoy this type of stuff though, is there a term for it? Potential SIGBOVIK papers? But more seriously, for communications, it would be "covert channels". I met someone at NCSU who was working on something with bots communicating through WoW trade offers (which would be unlikely to be logged, unlike trades or chat messages).
  - nwiswell 4y ago
    > What stops you from using discord messages as a database? :p I really enjoy this type of stuff though, is there a term for it? "Our tech stack is Clojure hosted on the JVM of massively distributed workers running opportunistically on Robocode Tank Royale with homebrew float-encoded protobuf message passing, and using NoSQL Discord messages as a backend."
    - heyitsguay 4y ago
      You say it's an ugly hack, but our +0.8% profit margins speak for themselves!
exikyut 4y ago
That's a bit like the protocol some smart lightbulbs use to connect to Wi-Fi networks, which is simultaneously genius and depressingly dystopian. TIL that Wi-Fi encryption is vaguely akin to a VPN, in that it encrypts at the TCP/UDP/etc level, not the IP level, and TIL also that Wi-Fi encryption (which is a stream cipher) does not alter packet lengths. Soooo, when you "pair" such a lightbulb using this protocol, the companion app is actually just spraying empty packets with specific packet lengths to 255.255.255.255, and the lightbulb's ESP8266 (or similar) is sitting in monitor mode and circularly-logging the lengths of the packets it sees into a buffer in memory until it sees a valid setup message. If you presume the setup message is protected by some sort of key you'd be sorely mistaken :D your Wi-Fi SSID and PSK are available in plaintext to anything and everything that happens to be in monitor mode at the time. Like I said, genius yet very very hard to not see as deliberately chaotic-evil.
- remram 4y ago
  That is false, layers 3 and up are encrypted with WiFi, and VPNs as well.

by nlnn 4y ago

tra3 4y ago

Brilliant. I thought about game of life that had such simple rules but amazing emergent behaviour. No surprise that something as sophisticated as tank wars has strategies never anticipated by the original creators.

nwiswell 4y ago

What stops this kind of coordination from being used to smuggle an arbitrary massively parallel workload onto the system? :o)

zachrip 4y ago
What stops you from using discord messages as a database? :p I really enjoy this type of stuff though, is there a term for it? A while back after skype got rid of their sdk I was annoyed that the app didn't unfurl gifs. So I reverse engineered their api for sending/updating messages and I realized you could update a message that contained a file. The only problem was the file had to be on their servers or a client wouldn't display it. So I reverse engineered the ios app as well to find a way to get a file on their servers (I don't recall why I couldn't do it from the web api). After that I had two things: a way to get files on their servers, and an api to update messages. So I took each frame of a gif, uploaded to their servers, and then used the api to update the message at the rate of the gif. Of course there will be people making discord bots out there laughing at how simple this sounds, but the combination of reverse engineering as well as applying that to affect a new feature in the app I thought was pretty novel.
- gs17 4y ago
  > What stops you from using discord messages as a database? :p I really enjoy this type of stuff though, is there a term for it? Potential SIGBOVIK papers? But more seriously, for communications, it would be "covert channels". I met someone at NCSU who was working on something with bots communicating through WoW trade offers (which would be unlikely to be logged, unlike trades or chat messages).
- nwiswell 4y ago
  > What stops you from using discord messages as a database? :p I really enjoy this type of stuff though, is there a term for it? "Our tech stack is Clojure hosted on the JVM of massively distributed workers running opportunistically on Robocode Tank Royale with homebrew float-encoded protobuf message passing, and using NoSQL Discord messages as a backend."
  - heyitsguay 4y ago
    You say it's an ugly hack, but our +0.8% profit margins speak for themselves!

exikyut 4y ago

That's a bit like the protocol some smart lightbulbs use to connect to Wi-Fi networks, which is simultaneously genius and depressingly dystopian. TIL that Wi-Fi encryption is vaguely akin to a VPN, in that it encrypts at the TCP/UDP/etc level, not the IP level, and TIL also that Wi-Fi encryption (which is a stream cipher) does not alter packet lengths. Soooo, when you "pair" such a lightbulb using this protocol, the companion app is actually just spraying empty packets with specific packet lengths to 255.255.255.255, and the lightbulb's ESP8266 (or similar) is sitting in monitor mode and circularly-logging the lengths of the packets it sees into a buffer in memory until it sees a valid setup message. If you presume the setup message is protected by some sort of key you'd be sorely mistaken :D your Wi-Fi SSID and PSK are available in plaintext to anything and everything that happens to be in monitor mode at the time. Like I said, genius yet very very hard to not see as deliberately chaotic-evil.

remram 4y ago
That is false, layers 3 and up are encrypted with WiFi, and VPNs as well.