Cordial Minuet Twitter bot

jere · 2015-01-18 13:44:13

Cordial Minuet is anonymized, but there's been a lot of talk lately about how to identify your opponents through the leaderboards. In one thread, AnoHito suggests (jokingly I hope) leaving games immediately in order to avoid a specific player.

I think the better solution here is a Twitter bot and I've written one: Canto Delirium

It scans the profit leaderboards every 5 minutes. If only two players have different profits from the last check, it can reasonably assume they played a game together. Otherwise, it just tells you the differences among many people and you can sort it out yourself. I might be able to make it faster than 5 minutes, but that already seems like a good balance between nuisance on the server and accuracy. I really like the way this gives you a more tangible record of your victories and defeats, something you can retweet or hand out as a link.

Let me know about bugs or requests. I have a few ideas for additional behavior. I'm recording all of the profit changes going forward, so maybe there'd be some way to query your recent profit history. Or maybe I'll just make the damn thing spit out random numbers 1-36, anagrams, or jokes (Chin Professor walks into a bar....).

Professor Chin · 2015-01-18 15:27:26

Wow! It's really nice to see who you played against.
Also you see who is playing at the moment without "spoiling" too much (unless there are 2 people around )
Thank you!

PersonGuy · 2015-01-18 18:26:17

Wow, nice! Small suggestion, maybe you could make an additional bot for wins over a certain threshold for a less spammy alternative?

Omnibot · 2015-01-18 18:56:07

It only sends out a msg every 5 minis. It's not spammy at that rate If it was after every match that might be a touch spammy.

claspa · 2015-01-18 20:05:42

It's great, thanks. I like to get to know in hindsight against whom I've just played.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-18 20:29:22

Here's another idea:

Make a service that people can use to create a name-specific twitter bot that only spits out a stream for their name. Then they can follow that twitter stream to hear only about their own games.

Well, not sure if that's possible. I bet the Twitter API doesn't allow a bot to create new twitter accounts.

So, maybe people would have to create their own twitter account and pass your bot the login credentials.

jere · 2015-01-18 20:51:55

The bot is currently going to attempt to post everything. So even though it's only every 5 minutes, there should still a mention of every match. Sometimes it can condense them at the rate of ~2 matches per tweet though. As it stands, I view this as more a webpage you go to when you're playing rather than something you follow. I mean, if you want to follow it be my guest of course!

If there's enough interest, I could indeed make another one that only tweets high stakes matches. Then the question is: what's a "high stakes" match. $1? $5? There were about 20 games over the past day in which more than $1 changed hands (as opposed to 88 tweets in total).

Make a service that people can use to create a name-specific twitter bot that only spits out a stream for their name. Then they can follow that twitter stream to hear only about their own games. Well, not sure if that's possible. I bet the Twitter API doesn't allow a bot to create new twitter accounts.

I doubt it also (I had to do a phone verification this time to make a twitter "app").

But I did have a similar idea. You would @ the bot with a list of aliases you wanted to "follow" and the bot would henceforth reply back to you every time they had a match. That way you could keep track of your own account or any arbitrary account you are interested in without actually following the bot. Anyone up for that?

Hoping that the leaderboards don't get cached by the way... that would pretty much nip this thing in the bud.

sjon03 · 2015-01-19 01:41:17

jere, perhaps you could add each player's ELO rank or rating in the tweets.

.. · 2015-01-19 04:52:13

This is really sweet. I love the thematic twitter account.

I thought the bot had gone down because there weren't any tweets for 30 min, but I guess it was a freak lull!

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-19 06:57:20

Oh... caching leaderboards were on my to-do list. It seems bad to ever know who you played against, because that can be exploited in many ways. The leaderboards weren't MEANT to reveal this kind of info.

I was going to set it to update the cached data every 5 minutes, so I don't think it would mess up your bot too much.

.. · 2015-01-19 09:24:44

Well, right now fetching the leaderboard every 5 min is often sufficient to work out who played whom. If the game becomes much more popular though, it'll become a mess. I think that 5 min before finding out who you played is far more than enough to prevent exploiting it... unless you're playing high (or unique-valued) stakes and there's only a couple other players playing at those stakes.

jere · 2015-01-19 14:28:10

Ah, ok. If the leaderboards cache for 5 minutes, that's perfect (hopefully I'd just hit it 1 minute after the refresh instead of 1 before). If the game gets significantly more popular, yea, most of the time you wouldn't get the P1 vs P2 aspect. Even if you can't sort out who played against each other, it's still really useful to see who is active.

.., glad you like it! It actually did go down last for quite a while last night. A locked cron job or something. I had the thing on for one day and it fails already... ugh. I really need to get some new hosting.

sjon03, that's possible but I hesitate to do that. Elo is already easily accessible. The goal with this bot was to highlight the temporal differences that otherwise go unnoticed.

.. · 2015-01-20 09:34:28

If the scoreboards were simply delayed for 5 minutes (showing 5 minutes in the past) rather than cached every 5 minutes, then it would still be possible to check them more frequently and tease out the games that occurred, while not providing information on who you're currently playing. Now I know delayed scoreboards aren't the easiest thing to implement, but probably the easiest way would be to cached them every X (eg 2) minutes, and serve up the scoreboard cached Y (eg 5) minutes ago.

jere · 2015-01-20 13:08:23

Well there's no way to know who you're currently playing. Not sure I follow.

Remember that the boards no longer change when you enter a game, right?

Last edited by jere (2015-01-20 14:01:55)

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-20 21:21:25

Leaderboard caching is in place now.

jere · 2015-01-20 23:56:53

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you're only updating the cache/resetting the timer when the page is viewed. I've checked a few times since you posted about the change and I usually get "Updated 0 seconds ago." Not that I'm pushing for this change or anything, but if your goal is to prevent checking and immediately getting results, that isn't being accomplished (at least when activity is low). It's compounded by there being multiple boards that can each give you a clue about who was playing (there should usually be at least one that hasn't seen a page view in 5 minutes).

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-21 01:48:55

Are you sure this is a problem?

My understanding is that RELOADING a board is the trick that's used to spot differences. So, you load it once, play a game, and then afterward reload it again to see who you played against. If this process takes less than 5 minutes, then the cache will prevent you from getting the information that you need, because you'll see an unchanged board the second time. If this process takes more than 5 minutes, you'll see a changed board the second time, but enough time will have passed that (hopefully) loads of changes will be present.

If you haven't viewed the board in a long time, I don't see how loading it fresh (not cached) is going to give you any useful delta information, so that's not a problem. It's the immediate delta's we're trying to stop.

That said, maybe 5 minutes is too short.

.. · 2015-01-21 02:17:32

If this process takes more than 5 minutes, you'll see a changed board the second time, but enough time will have passed that (hopefully) loads of changes will be present.

Currently there are typically only a few changes in 5 minutes, and it's easy (for a human) to figure out who played who. But even if there were far more games happening at once you could still work out exactly who you played. Get a fresh copy of the leaderboard (wait a few minutes if it's too stale), then play a game with someone for 5 minutes. Leave, check the leaderboard again, and find your opopnent (their change in profit is 99.9% sure to be unique).

jere · 2015-01-21 03:19:32

Hmmm, I guess it's fine. Ignore what I said.

jasonrohrer · 2015-01-21 05:16:45

Yeah, Dot-Dot, so the point is that the interval may need to be longer. The fact that it only updates when the leaderboard is requested doesn't need fixing.

Cadrialmonument · 2015-01-21 07:38:19

How do you know your nickname?
Maybe a weird question but I can't remember giving a nickname consisting of 2 words.

Last edited by Cadrialmonument (2015-01-21 07:38:30)

sjon03 · 2015-01-21 07:41:18

Cadrialmonument wrote:

How do you know your nickname?
Maybe a weird question but I can't remember giving a nickname consisting of 2 words.

You don't choose your own nickname. A nickname is given to you that consists of two words from a set of 666 words Jason has chosen. I forget exactly how he chose those 666 words, but there's an explanation behind it all somewhere in this forum. All I know is that the 666th word in that set is "destruction." Eerie.

You can find your nickname in the email you received confirming your very first deposit into the game. The subject of the email should be, "Cordial Minuet Deposit Receipt."

Edited to include link to thread explaining naming.

Last edited by sjon03 (2015-01-21 08:27:49)

Cadrialmonument · 2015-01-21 07:43:39

@sjon03

Thanks man, forgot about the emails!

Cobblestone · 2015-01-28 03:21:29

Just wanted to say that the Twitter bot is awesome. Jere, I think some of the ideas you have to expand on it are great and I hope you continue developing it. I especially love the idea of @'ing to get a player's current stats or something along those lines.

(Also hi, I'm new!)

joshwithguitar · 2015-01-29 03:46:03

https://twitter.com/canto_delirium/stat … 8318001152
JEOPARDY ALCOHOL trumps BIRD GRADUATION for $1.94. JEOPARDY is now at $15.83 profit!

Jere, this didn't happen.
Around this time I actually won a $1 game against someone. I wanted to see who, then this popped up out of nowhere.

CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

#1 2015-01-18 13:44:13

Cordial Minuet Twitter bot

#2 2015-01-18 15:27:26

Re: Cordial Minuet Twitter bot

#3 2015-01-18 18:26:17

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#4 2015-01-18 18:56:07

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#5 2015-01-18 20:05:42

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#6 2015-01-18 20:29:22

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#7 2015-01-18 20:51:55

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#8 2015-01-19 01:41:17

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