fyquah / messenger-solitaire-bot

A bot to play solitaire in messenger

Messenger Solitaire Bot

A bot to play solitaire in messenger.

Usage

Compiling: make

Running: make run

Source Code Organization

There are a few components to it:

1. JNI interface with the Robot class to capture screenshots, control the mouse and keyboards.
2. Using template matching in OpenCV, new cards are identified. That is converted into a game state.
3. The bot "cheats" by going through all the cards in the draw pile in the beginning.
4. The game state is purely markovian, hence a function move_t solve(state_t) can decide the best move.
5. As soon as the solver encounters a fixed point (that is execute(state, solve(state)) == state), the program terminates.

I had some problems getting everything running with a headless JVM (i believe it is some problems with X server or something along that line), hence, I ran everything in a java proces, calling into JNI method on every frame.

Projected FAQ

0. How easy is it to get it running on my own machine?

I am glad you are interested in this project! You will need to tune some vision parameters in test/vision.hpp depending on your machine, and where you decide to position your window. I wish to automate this process, at some point.

1. Why don't you machine learning this?

Much wow.

2. Why don't you treat this as a markovian decision problem and run some TD-learning algorithms on this?

I didn't really understand reinforcement learning (I still don't), but from what I can gather, this is a non-deterministic purely markovian decision problem with perfect information. This gives it really nice properties:

• randomness of the game prevents it from stucking in local optima
• it has a finite discrete action space 7 + ((7 + 1) * 4) + 1 + 4

so, I'd expect even the simplest greedy TD-learning algorithm like those in TD-backgammon work.

there has been quite a bit of previous work in this -- a simple search in google scholars yield some interesting results. A fun experiment to try "learning" to see if a policy to "remember" what it has seen in the draw pile without explicitly adding it in the state.

3. Why did you have to partially implement this in C++, rather than just use Java on the whole stack?

I don't want to java.

4. The code looks like a mess. Wh....

I agree.

5. Why number_t rather than rank_t?

I am not a native english speaker. I didn't know that it is called rank until I shared the project with my friends.

License

MIT