Thousands of new players are flocking to play HQ Trivia every day, but as the live trivia game show grows in popularity, the threat of bots ruining the sanctity of the game grows.
Toby Mellor, a 19-year-old computer science student at Loughborough University, built a tool that allows players to scrub Google when a question is asked, figure out the most likely answer, and respond within the 10-second window. According to the company’s terms of service, found within its app, the company reserves the right to, “disqualify any entries that it believes in good faith are generated by an automated means or scripts. Entries generated by script, macro or other automated means are void.”
Mellor told Polygon he hasn’t tested the bot during a live game, because it violates the aforementioned terms, but used a video of a previously recorded episode to test the bot’s response.
The bot uses QuickTime to display the phone’s screen, plugged into an Apple computer, on a monitor. When a question is asked, players take a screenshot on their computer of the possible answers. That photo is then uploaded to Google’s Vision API. Text detection and Google’s Custom Search Engine API are used to analyze the question. A number of answers will appear in the running script and will return the most likely result. This is all done through a script that Mellor created and takes approximately seven seconds to complete. Mellor’s methodology can be seen in action and further in-depth in the video below.
Although Mellor hasn’t tested his script in a live game, he says he has used a number of recorded sessions to test the bot’s accuracy.
“It’s accurate about 90 to 95 percent of the time,” Mellor told Polygon. “If you pair that with an extra life [something players have in-game], you’re going to win quite often.”
His decision to create a bot that can help players cheat wasn’t malicious, he said. Mellor said he’s a big fan of the game and, after playing it for quite some time, wanted to explore whether creating a bot that could help players was even possible.
Mellor reiterated multiple times during our conversation that despite the bot violating HQ’s terms and conditions, he believed there was no way it could be detected. And Mellor isn’t the only person who’s thinking about how to use artificial intelligence to get ahead in HQ Trivia, which lets players win real money. Twitter is chock full of conversations about whether bots are already being used and programmers working together to develop functioning bots.
Polygon reached out to HQ multiple times, but the company declined to comment on the possibility of bots being used in-game.
It’s only a matter of time, Mellor said, before developers start looking into ways to cheat. People who win HQ Trivia are awarded an actual cash prize. If the prize pool were to reach a total of $10,000, it’s incentive for developers to look into ways to ensure they’re winning a piece of the final prize every time.
This is where attention to winners will come into play for HQ, according to Mellor. Since there’s no way to detect his bot — and because it’s likely other programmers and developers will figure out a way to create similar, hard-to-detect artificially intelligent helpers — HQ will have to keep a close eye on who’s winning.
“Unless someone is always winning every single night, then it’s likely they’re using a bot,” Mellor said. “It’s going to be hard for HQ to prove that they are using a bot if it’s undetectable.”
Despite the threat facing HQ Trivia, Mellor said there is way for the company to prevent bots from taking over the game.
“They need to treat their livestreams the way that Netflix treats their videos,” Mellor said. “So it’s copyrighted content. If I plug in my phone, while I’m watching Netflix on my phone, that won’t show up on my computer. So that’s one way they could prevent it — by treating it like a DRM.”
Mellor isn’t the only person working on a bot that aides players who are engaging with HQ Trivia, but he’s certainly one of the first. When asked if he was going to release the script on GitHub or a similar site, Mellor laughed and answered with an immediate “No.”
“If I release this, then the game that people love, well, it’s not fair,” Mellor said. “And I don’t want to ruin that, to be honest.”
HQ Trivia is available to download for free on iOS devices.