17 Nov 08 GazBot on WeeWar

A friend from work who has a bit of a knack for the mathematics of gambling has been playing with the Betfair API and developed a bookmaker bot to automagically take and place bets. The way it works is no different to someone logging on to betfair and taking a bet for some competitor to win / lose an event, but because he’s automated the process it’s able to process LOTS of transactions (I’m not going to give away any numbers) across multiple events. I don’t know / understand the exact details of how it works, but it seems to be doing quite well for him!

So hearing about what he’s done has inspired me to create a bot of my own. I’m steering clear of Betfair as knowing my luck all my spare money would disappear within a month, so instead I’m gonna have a go at creating a WAR BOT! Or, more specifically, a WEEWAR bot! Hmm… weewar used to have a wikipedia page, however it looks like it’s been deleted (”reason was ‘Non-notable game, no citations from multiple reliable, third-party published sources.”…. pah!). Basically, weewar is a turn-based strategy game based on maps composed of hexagons representing different terrain types. Once a player controls a base he is able to produce more units (troopers, tanks, ships, aircraft), which can be used to capture / destroy enemy units. The game is won once a single player has eliminated all enemy units. So far this sounds fairly ordinary, and it will continue to do so… unless you’re the kind of person that has an interest in WEB SERVICES, because weewar has it’s own “RESTFul” API (ok, technically it might not be RESTful in the strictest sense, but it’s the buzzword of the year so I’ll go with it)!

And so the idea for gazbot was born! So far all I’ve really done is create a crude implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm in order for units to follow the shortest path to any given coordinate. Next I’ll need to create some form of strategy for choosing which coordinate to head for, and some way of determining how to behave according to the situation. No, this isn’t going to be easy, and yes, it will probably be next to useless against any half-decent human player, but it should still be a fun experiment and hopefully it’ll beat a couple of the other weewar bots already out there!

Tags: api, betfair, bot, programming, restful, web service, weewar