Heart Radio is running a competition where you can win a family annual pass to Wookey Hole. The competition is a matching pairs game where you turn over a card and then find another card that matches the same image.
The bot was originally working out each card based on the text description, processing it as an image with a crude but quick form of OCR (optical character recognition). While the speed of the OCR was fast, the training was a slow manual process. After spending some time doing this, I realised that the card text description was actually regular text that could be copied.
I opted to go for copying the text rather than using OCR since the manual training for the OCR was taking a very long time. It’s a slower method but the bot is already so quick that it doesn’t make much difference.
My bot was able to beat the game in 9.7 seconds. You could get this down to about 8 seconds by removing some of the delays, but it wouldn’t perform consistently. Although you only need to win the game once, so consistency isn’t all that important here. Swapping from the text copying to the original OCR would also speed up the bot.
Please note that I haven’t actually entered the competition.
If you’re wondering why the game is bigger than it appears on the Heart radio website, it’s because I loaded up the flash file directly rather than loading up the Heart page that holds the smaller version of the game that you usually see.