Splinterlands: The Bot Problem!

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Hivers, we hope all of you are having a great day. Today, In this blog we will cover:

What is a bot?
Why it is a problem?
How to detect it?
The algorithm that can detect it?
Suggestions to fix this problem?

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First of all, Thank you @bulldog1205 for bringing this to my attention through your Post Are Bots Killing Splinterlands?

Secondly, I recently color a splinterlands logo pixel by pixel manually. This was my tribute to the LGBTQ+ community. You might wanna check it out! Here

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Now coming back to the topic.

Bots:

A bot is a software program that replicates human actions and automates them with repetitive actions without getting tired based upon the set of rules provided. As the task is done automatically it is much faster. Back in the days of steem bots were one of the reasons for their failure.

Problem with Bots:

As I mentioned above Bots can do tasks more efficiently than humans in some cases. Here in splinterlands bots in bronze 3 can easily farm more dec and claim chest rewards which will recover its investment cost in few weeks and then the same user will run more and more bots in a loop. This makes the experience of newcomers in splinterlands worse because they will be playing against mindless machines which will result in boring enemy team formations and all games will look the same to the newcomer thus he might think that splinterlands lack strategy gameplay and leaves the game forever. As bots farm much faster dec, It really discourages players to play the game and use bots instead.

Bot Detection:

I remember my teacher gave me an example in our classroom in general public terms which I would like to share with you all. Imagine all girls in the world wear handbags. From CCTV cameras we can detect if the robber had a handbag or not. Although this can be used to detect gender but is a very complex task. In the same way, we can add attributes of real users and bots. For example, A user can't play 5 hours without a break. A user can't associate with an IP address that traces back to no real address. A user will not duplicate a strategy a lot of times. A user must have a bore meter that detects a normal human can't play without getting bored. In short, we can track the behaviors of real humans and their digital footprints. All this is done by using advanced algorithms running almost 24/7 and alert us whenever there is a suspicious activity.

Algorithm:

The Naive Bayes Algorithm helps us read the text and other information and classify it. This classification is about classifying humans, bots, and undefined. This can then further be enhanced by using a Genetic algorithm. Although it is just a suggestion there might be better Algorithms to perform this task.

Suggestions:

1. Banning bot accounts:
   I know everyone, might say it will destroy the nature of de-centralization. But this can be achieved by DAO and SPS will be used to cast votes. This can be done by proposals after bots are detected and after all, the investigation is done.

2. Banning bot account from splinterlands community:
   If their whole account is not taken down then we can simply block them from other additional things like streamer giveaways, basically, it will be a ban from all the community-related things.

3. IP/Mac Implementation:
   The same Ip/Mac address should not play at the same time.

4. IP/Mac Ban:
   If multiple users are playing from the same account and the IP is related to a VPN service or detected as a person running bots, the IP should be banned.

5. Cooldown:
   A human has a specific ability to play the game if someone exceeds that start a cooldown timer, which might be fixed by the discord support team.

All of these are for bots detected by the system.

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