🚀 go-pugleaf

In git.announce Akash Patel <gte383j@prism.gatech.edu> wrote:
: hmm...lets see, we at Tech being the geniuses we are, broke (not really))
: online jeopardy, we maxed out the counter...they were useing int or short or
: something on their java version and we maxed it out...someone can clarify the
: technical stuff :)

The sony admins were complete idiots.  At first, your individual game 
score could hurt your school's score if you were stupid and scored
negative points.  Nothing could stop say a GT student from posing as a
stupid DAWG fan and bringing down UGA's school score.  So the admins
eventually had to change the rules when they noticed UGA couldn't break
the thousand mark (well, not really ... so I'm exaggerating a little).

From what I could tell, their algorithm most likely was:  
  
  if (game_points + school_points > school_points) 
      school_points += game_points;

  individual_points += game_points;

They used a signed 32 bit integer to keep track of the score, which
both we and UVA maxed out.  Notice that with the above algorithm, the
school_score will never "wrap around" (it will just stay at the
MAX_INTEGER), however the individual_score will.  (It was kind of
interesting to wake up after 4 hours of sleep and noticing your
player accrued a total of -1,000,000 points and walked right off
the edge of the leader board).

Since the school_points didn't wrap around, needless to say both UVA and
us stayed at the top for several days before the sony webmonkeys finally
reset both of us to some arbitrary dollar amount.

Then the admins then decided to employ some real tough security and stop
accepting connections to their webserver from non-browsers.  This
foiled neither UVA or us (My user-agent string quickly became "To Hell
With Georgia v0.0").  Also some crude Virginia Tech bots started firing up
and there was basically us, UVA, and VT all back in the running again.  
After a few days, we and UVA were back up to the max integer and VT was
struggling along in third.

The best hack was a bug in their daily double code.  You were given 4
multiple choice answers to a given question.  For any non daily double and
non final jeopardy question, if you did not know the answer, you were
always allowed to pass.  (This was by clicking the PASS button, or for the
bots, sending the cgi var 'answer=0').  If you PASSed you did not lose
your wager.  However, you are not allowed to PASS on the daily double /
final jeopardy questions, so instead of writing a rule into their server,
these cs geniuses simply removed the PASS button that appeared in the
HTML.  However, you could still select answer=0 if you wanted to and
would not lose a thing.  So the double jeopardy and final jeopardy 
strategy became very simple: always bet max.  If you know it, great.  If
you don't, pass.  (I thought they might be able to use this to tell you
were a bot, but I'm pretty sure they never did.)

(I even pointed this fact out to sony, and they still never bothered
to fix it.)

After the tournament was over, we were the supposed winners (we were
actually tied with UVA at MAX_INT, but were ordered lexicographically ahead
of UVA on the standings).  The web people "looked into it" and then
determined afterwards that we only had x number of "valid" points and UVA
had y > x.  So, UVA won.  VT, I believe, was second.  We got bumped to
third.  I tried emailing them again, but by this time sony was ignoring
me.  (I hear they were ignoring just about all the tech students too.)

: they said we cheated, just cuz they same person seemed to be playing multiple
: times at lightning speed and getting everything right....how dare they make
: such terrible accusations!!

Well, we had several people running bots.  I still say there was nothing
in their rules that prevented the use of bots.  You were not allowed to
give away or share your username, password, or answers to previous
online jeopardy questions.  Everything else should have been legal.

I still have the copies of email correspondence I received from sony
... it is actually quite funny.

: btw, there was some nasty little rumor going on about using a bot to play and
: learn the game ;)

Not a rumor.  ;)

-- 
Matthew Fisher