   Gambling site specifically for bot players
  Hi. Sorry if this is the wrong place to be posting this, would just like to gauge some peoples opinions of this idea.Basically my idea is to create a online gaming site which actually encourages people to generate bot's to play the games for them. The idea being to give people interested in A.I. programming an opportunity to go up against other programmers to see who can make the best bot players and encourage computer scientist students like myself to actually put into practice various algorithms we have been learning about. At the moment I'm just thinking about the idea but think the site could be a useful way of helping teach about various algorithms but I'm worried about the ethical aspects of such a site so would love to hear peoples opinions on this.Depending on what people think about such a site, I would like to incoorporate a side to it which will allow people to make money from it. For example if two users wager £1 on a game, the winner will recieve £2 and the loser will recieve nothing. Again I am somewhat concerned by the ethical aspects of this.Any thoughts positive and negative are more than welcome   
  Well, forget ethics for the moment and worry about legality.  First and foremost, before you think of instituting any "real money" gambling site, be sure that it is legal in your country/city/county(or location of your server) to host such a site.With that being said and making the point that I am not a lawyer, but I do play one in my own psychotic delusions, my ethical opinion on the matter would be that it would be downright wrong to have people wagering on their AI scripts, especially considering things like these are made to play for indefinite periods of time, over and over again, as amassing the most of X value is their sole directive, it could lead to some whopping credit card bills and possibly more trouble than it's worth for you.That being said, something along these lines only with "fake money" would probably not be so terribly bad, however, the question and suspicion arises, is this just a training ground for robots to go and play on real gambling sites?I think that looking at the legality and ethics of the matter should come primary in something like this.  There have been, since the dawn of the internet, programs that were online, multi-user and involved teaching people how to script.  The original, I believe it was called Robot Wars and subsequent offspring were made to teach people how to program in C, &#106avascript and other languages while providing the fun outlet of a game in order to do so.  When you start talking about writing computer programs to take people's real money... they start to get understandably edgy.My two cents, something to chew on,VopiskP.S.  Yes, my suggestion is to just write a better robot wars if you really want to create a sandbox for scripting.   ;  Speaking of robot wars and such, if you go back to them after programming in the 'real world' for awhile, you will TOTALLY OWN.Furthermore, gambling AI has already pretty much hit state of the art. Games like black jack are easy, especially since you can't stop the AI from counting cards. Dice games and roulette are even easier, as they are just based on probability. Slot machines are the easiest of all - it doesn't matter what the AI does, it loses.   ;  fair points, thanks for your replys. The more I think about the idea the more problems I find with it so have gone off the idea now....thanks for your help!   ;  As Vopisk stated 'is this just a training ground for robots to go and play on real gambling sites?'Another thread of yours ('Maximising score algorithm') asks for AI help on a blocks game & it appears you've used this program hundreds of times on a cash-based gambling site called Gameaccount - Actually, looking at the information there, you've played this game over 700 times!!Whilst I don't gamble on these myself, I can't help feeling angry at what you are doing - how do you think the people you're stealing money off of would feel if they knew that you were using these cheat programs?Shame on you, I should report your activities.;  I'm interested. If it's not for actual money, it would be good for learning how to be a quant. If it is for actual money, you may as well get a job as a quant.Alternatively, you could see about setting up some server to a commodity market or access to FX trading. Then you could let people trade on your platform. Currently, more solutions are very expensive so only investment banks and hedge funds dare let bots on them.   ;  Sorry about taking a long time to reply, have been away on holiday. Thanks for your post flangazor, even if the site wasnt for cash it would still have many problems including being a breeding ground for future cheaters on other cash sites . I'm looking into other possibilities including a MMORPG where u can actually programme little bits and pieces like actions and weapons yourself but this idea is still on the drawing board.As for 'Anonymous Posters' post, I have never and would never use any software I create to illegally win money,as you quite rightly put this would be stealing and highly immorral. My other post: 'Maximising Score Algorithm' was purely for a little revision project I made up based on that particular gameaccount game using only a couple of premade grids so I could help revise my Algorithms module for my second year for university. Not only would I not know where to start with adapting that program to read in grids from the gameaccount site (I assume some kind of memory reader or screen recognition would be needed and I'm obviously not that bright), but also it would be fraud and I would rather stay away from jail. As you  quite rightly point out however, I've played many games on that site, during my little project on that game I was finding patterns and methods of finding large scores and clearing the grid 90% of the time, some of these patterns are not too hard to work out on paper. As no computing of how the grid is to be played by the computer, I assume that although its incredibly geeky to actually find a pen and paper method for solving such a game, its more ethical than letting a computer do the work....   