Bitcoin Forum

I'm thinking of making a website where people play skill-based games against each other for Bitcoins.

They would either be simple video games or turn-based ("boardgame"-type) games.

People would pay into a pool at the start of the game and the winner of the game would then take the pool.


Would anybody be interested in joining me? I'm mainly looking for programmers.
 :)

It's a horrible idea, anything involving skills would eventually turn into a war of whose bot is better.

You might as well set it up as an AI challenge straight away then ;)

It would have to be games for which AI could not be programmed so easily.
Once a game would have AI programmed for them anyway we would have to drop it.
So basically we would be adding new games every once in while.

Also, I would say if you only can put a small of Bitcoins into the pot for every game (say 0.01 BTC) it wouldn't necessarily be worthwhile to spend many hours programming an AI.

What kind of games can you think of that would be hard to program a bot for? Chess? I could have a bot up and running for any game you can think of within half an hour

Obviously you cannot use game like Chess that have been around for a long time. Because there are plenty of AI programs already developed for them.
So I would introduce completely new abstract games with deep branching factors.

For example the game "Nymbat" that I have developed:
http://www.cjgames.com/index.php?page=nymbat

I don't think you can program a bot within 30 minutes to beat me at Nymbat. Are you willing to make a bet on that?

Also, you could randomly challenge a player with catpchas to check if there is a human actually playing a game. This would at least discourage bots running automatically without a human attending.

Similarly, we could also make some completely new retro-style video games.

There is always a relevant XKCD.  :P

Mouse-over alt: The top computer champion at Seven Minutes in Heaven is a Honda-built Realdoll, but to date it has been unable to outperform the human Seven Minutes in Heaven champion, Ken Jennings.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/game_ais.png

Trivia games would also be a possibility.

If it's more than 2 people in a game, one person will make fake accounts and they will cheat the system that way.  I thought about making a space strategy game a couple months ago, but this is one problem I couldn't overcome.

Trivia games would be ridicoulsy easy to Google and the images shows computers playing in comparison to the TOP players, meaning the vast majority would still loose to a bot playing on "Insane" in Starcraft 2

Yes, we would have to offer only two-player games.

The computer you need to play trivia sucessfully against humans is not available to the public. It's some high-end machine built by IBM.

Also, I'm thinking about giving only a very short time to enter an answer, so that searching for an answer manually would take too much of your time.
And you could display the question as a captcha graphic so that it would be very hard for a computer to automatically read the question.

Humans need time to think too, giving enough time for a human to think is giving enough time for the human to Google an answer, other alternatives might be forcing the user into showing a live video feed which will virtually eliminate people stealing but will also decrease the potential players drastically.

Both players will have the same amount of time to answer a question. So if a player is really fast with googling an answer, faster than most people can think of the answer, then that's ok too, because that's basically a skill too.

I'm thinking of a mechanism like Jeopardy where you hit a button if you know the answer. You then get some extra time to type in the answer. If you need to google the answer then hitting the button before you have found it is risky because you don't know if you will actually find the answer. A person who knows the answer on the other hand and can just hit the button right away, so he would probably be a lot faster.

We would have two categories of games:

Human vs. Human only:
Here we would make our best effort to ensure that only humans would be playing against each other.
Such measures would include:
- captchas
- only relatively unknown abstract games with a high branching factor for which there is no AI programmed for yet (examples: Nymbat, SEI)
- new video games for which it is hard to make an AI for (possibly with the use of pattern recognition)
- trivia-type games (possibly)
Once a game is suspected to have an AI programmed for it we would move it into the "Free-for-All" category below.
So we would be constantly introdcuing new games into this category so that it would not be worthwhile to program an AI for a game here.

Free-For-All:
Here AIs would explicitly be allowed. We would issue a warning to human players.
In this category also commonly played games such as Chess could be offered.


Wagers would be relatively low to discourage cheating. I'm thinking three choices: 0.001 BTC, 0.01 BTC, and 0.1 BTC as the maximum bet.
Also, all games could also be played without a wager (for free).

All games would be two-player games only to avoid people setting up fake accounts.

This is such a hard thing to come up with.
We couldn't think of any good games that wouldn't immediately be played by AIs - and that takes all the fun out of it to my mind.
In the end we went with chance games that can't be manipulated by bots, but maybe we should add some skill games
alongside just to play for fun?

https://bitcoin-arcade.com/

I think even without skill games are also using the bot, but skill games are more good in this atleast you use your skill and play , if their is bot for that we can do nothing, the site should be some more tight with security so that no one cannot use bot

Your site is basically gamble games, not even required skill(mostly).
Your right about "it's such hard thing", but there's no impossible if it can be happens, developing perfect skill games is need a lot capital + hire a partner who an expert in such games is necessary. I ever have an idea which combined monopoly games + bitcoin with perfect motion and graphic such "get rich" line game app.

We are already working on some skill based multiplayer games.
We are planning to release on Mobile and Web as of now.
Would need to see how good can we tackle the AI.

Developing perfect skill games is need a lot capital + hire a partner who an expert in such games is necessary. I ever have an idea which combined monopoly games + bitcoin with perfect motion and graphic such "get rich" line game app.
Just because of this OP drop this idea and leave this all here and in last 4 years no other person have any idea like this because too much risk and hard work both need for this project

This amount of btc is definitely worth the while for an experienced programmer who can create AI bots quickly. Also, once the bot is created, he can (probably) get to use it multiple times before being detected.

Turn based games? Sounds cool to me. I would really follow this project from here until it is done. I played games like that since I am a kid and it is not a boring game.
Good luck to you guys and looking forward to your work when it is all done.

I would love for this type of site, especially if talking about "board-style" games like KOEI's old Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Liberty or Death games.

Even a RISK style war game is still popular with people.

Bot concerns will always be there, you talk about a small 0.01 btc pot as a deterrent but let me tell you that bots are happy to run for even 20 satoshi faucets! One way to get around this is to require some form of verification on player sign-up with age or some similar form of ranking to open up higher pots. And of course, player interaction which often helps identify bots in game.

I'm not a programmer but I had a very similar idea based loosely on Utopia (http://utopia-game.com/shared/) which combines a little economy and politics to form multi-player board style kingdoms.

My contribution to such a project would be in terms of creative content/direction. Hit me up if you're somewhere serious already.

yep - I agree problem is, as someone else said it just becomes a race to see who can get the best bot playing, and if there's winning money involved then it quickly becomes really unfair to the players.
Liking your monopoly game idea though -  think it's a good one!