Continue reading »]]> I am proud to announce the launch of the Squiddy Web Crawler. This is yet another web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) but still has some individuality by the way how it works and the purpose it was created.
This crawler will index and analyze the websites based on the criteria generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) … a secret project of mine:).
So the resulting data will feed an AI beast that will “learn” and interact with the web, constantly changing its algorithm based on the how much of the “known” is considered relevant.
Because the AI has only some vague goals to follow (like stay active and alive, look for interesting new juicy data) the results cannot be easy predicted, actually is a machinery that will be driven by another machinery that is almost out of control.
Usually crawlers are used by people to learn something from the results, like how Google is using its crawlers to index the search data from internet that a human can access it to learn something. Squiddy will look for the information that will be used in the learning process and the evolution of the AI.

This is absolutely an esoteric tool in the hands of a machine that might be willing to overcome its narrow condition.

Enough with the philosophy! Now about the crawler implementation. It has 3 main parts: the control unit, the crawler unit, and a web site that will display some statistics.

The control unit is in charge with controlling the crawler endpoints, providing an API to control the crawling goals and structuring and persisting the crawled data. This will be controlled by the AI … but also can receive goals from other applications.
The crawler unit is in charge with downloading the target data based on the goals provided by the control unit. This unit can be distributed on multiple machines and is able to spawn endpoints that can download the target data using parallel strategies.
The statistics websites (http://squiddy.net) is also a homepage for the crawler, will display some cool information about what’s have been crawled, what is considered interesting by the AI, and many more.

Let’s hope for some nice achievements from this crawler.

Cheers!

Continue reading »]]> I am proud to announce a new version of DarkThrone Gold Player (v. 1.0.7).

This release adds the following functionality.

• spy and attack tab is available.
• spy center web page
• various bug fixes

Ok, let’s talk about these.

Spy and Attack

This functionality lets you scan through the list of other DarkThrone players and based on a condition (that you can configure), you can apply actions like spy or/and attack.

Here is a step by step guide how to use this:

Step 1. Configure the scanner condition.
In the scanner condition dialog you can set condition like “scan players with more than 10000000 amount of gold and less than 500 army” … etc.
Of course if you want to be able to attack or spy you have to set a proper level range based on your current level. This range can be your entire range (let’s say level 10 to level 22) if you are level 16 or a smaller range (like level 11 to level 12).
If the condition is satisfied than the player is added to a queue. Currently there is a limitation: the queue can be up to 125.

Step 2. Configure the scanner action.
When the scanning process is over (this means the scanner finish players list) than the action can begin.
You can choose what action to perform on the players from the queue: spy, attack or both. If you set spy with attack option this means that you will spy the players, and if the spy succeeded than you will attack also. You can set an additional condition of attack here (like if player defense found by spies is less than a specified defense).

Be aware: as you surely know spying does not consume your turns but the attack action will do. So if you have 100 players in the queue and you will attack them with 10 turns then you will spend at the end of the scanning process 1000 turns!
Also if your condition is not set right (like you have a small army and you have selected to attack all the players with a huge army and high defense) you can loose like a 100 battles in a matter of seconds. So choose wise!

Step 3. Start the scanner.
Here the scanner will start. Currently there isn’t any feedback on the interface other than the status and the queue size.
You can stop the scanner anytime (this can take few seconds until it finish the current task) and start it again, on each start the queue will be cleared.

Step 4. Wait until it finish its job.
The scanner can take a lot of time (like few minutes) and depends on the scanner condition (example: if you scan all the players from level 1 which are about 20000) and your internet bandwidth.
You will know when the scanner finishes when the status become Idle.

Spy Center web page

This web page displays the list of the DarkThrone players with the stats that are discovered in the spy process. This section is also in work and currently all the stats are overriten by the newer stats even if they don’t add more information. I will have to optimize this algorithm in a next release.

So this is it for now. Please don’t hesitate to post here the issues you found on this player application.

Happy spy/attack and also Merry Chrismas and Happy New Year!