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After playing a lot of Tetris Friends, I started getting deja vu. Sometimes, after starting a new game and placing maybe 10-20 pieces, I would think, "Haven't I

After playing a lot of Tetris Friends, I started getting deja vu. Sometimes, after starting a new game and placing maybe 10-20 pieces, I would think, "Haven't I seen this exact board before?" Eventually I tested my theory through brute force: I would start a fresh game, write down the first 10 pieces, then restart. Over and over and over, until finally, I found it -- a duplicate! Apparently, Tetris Friends only seeded their RNG once, and there were only a few hundred possible seeds (perhaps 256? I didn't check). So if you got the same initial seed, you got the exact same pieces for the entire game. Tetris Friends also happened to have a highly competitive global leaderboard, where you tried to clear 40 lines as fast as possible... and I happened to have recently learned how to use AutoHotKey. You see where this is going. I restarted over and over until I got a good seed, then carefully played through a whole game, copying my inputs into a giant AutoHotKey script. Tetris Friends was a flash game, meaning it could only process so many inputs per second, so I had to insert a short delay between each input. Testing/debugging was a nightmare too, because I had to restart until I found the same seed again! But after a few hours, my script made it all the way through a game, and bam, I was #1 in the world. Felt real good for about a week, until Tetris Friends purged the leaderboard. :^)

conorcleary 4y ago
I had a similar experience about a decade ago with an online rock-paper-scissors vs. computer site. I quickly figured out the pattern and was able to win a few dozen times in a row (late night) and got bored, but it was a very intriguing exercise.
8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
i wrote a script that played Facebook bejeweled for me. took screenshot and then pick out the pixel colors from a grid since they're all different and mostly static. then simulated some clicks. it was a bad player but stupid fast so it racked up the score nonetheless.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  I once scripted Farmville, and quickly overtook all my friends who played it. Then somewhere at level 60 or 80 the game became so extremely slow that I gave up. The game could only handle a certain number of clicks per second, and the script would have to run for dozens of hours to gain yet another level. EDIT: That's because gaining levels required XP, and there was literally 1 XP for each click, regardless of what you did. You could figure out a strategy to get more gold, but I already had way more gold than I could spend. But there was no strategy to get more XP other than "click more". Up to certain level it was manageable, I just let the script run when I was away from the computer, and it took a few minutes to gain another level. Up to certain point, the required XP per level grew quadratically; behind that point it started growing exponentially, so I knew that I could never make more than 5 or 10 more levels past that point.
4m1rk 4y ago
Had a similar but simpler experience with Telegram's Lumberjack game [1]. Wrote a small Python script that scans a few pixels of screen and sends arrow key signals when sees a branch. The game was gradually speeding up to the point that script was not able to keep up yet it was beating any human easily. [1] https://telegram.games/telegram-games/lumberjack/ https://telegram.games/telegram-games/lumberjack/

conorcleary 4y ago

I had a similar experience about a decade ago with an online rock-paper-scissors vs. computer site. I quickly figured out the pattern and was able to win a few dozen times in a row (late night) and got bored, but it was a very intriguing exercise.

8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago

i wrote a script that played Facebook bejeweled for me. took screenshot and then pick out the pixel colors from a grid since they're all different and mostly static. then simulated some clicks. it was a bad player but stupid fast so it racked up the score nonetheless.

Viliam1234 4y ago
I once scripted Farmville, and quickly overtook all my friends who played it. Then somewhere at level 60 or 80 the game became so extremely slow that I gave up. The game could only handle a certain number of clicks per second, and the script would have to run for dozens of hours to gain yet another level. EDIT: That's because gaining levels required XP, and there was literally 1 XP for each click, regardless of what you did. You could figure out a strategy to get more gold, but I already had way more gold than I could spend. But there was no strategy to get more XP other than "click more". Up to certain level it was manageable, I just let the script run when I was away from the computer, and it took a few minutes to gain another level. Up to certain point, the required XP per level grew quadratically; behind that point it started growing exponentially, so I knew that I could never make more than 5 or 10 more levels past that point.

4m1rk 4y ago

Had a similar but simpler experience with Telegram's Lumberjack game [1]. Wrote a small Python script that scans a few pixels of screen and sends arrow key signals when sees a branch. The game was gradually speeding up to the point that script was not able to keep up yet it was beating any human easily. [1] https://telegram.games/telegram-games/lumberjack/ https://telegram.games/telegram-games/lumberjack/