A little background:

I play games on Pogo.com where you win "tokens" for playing or completing certain objectives. Those tokens can be turned in for raffles and prizes and are valuable because of it.

There is a seperate business aspect to it where people sell "autos", or programs that play these games automatically for you. For example, in a simple slot machine program it would click the "Maximum bet" button and then pull the handle, over and over.

Ethical/legal problems aside, Since I've recently decided to go back to school and pursue programming, I'm curious as to how something like this is done. I posted it here because I'm not sure what language these programs are written in exactly. So here are my questions:

- How does an auto "see" the screen? Does the program intercept and interact with the code being sent between the computers? Does it look at the screen somehow and see where the red checkers are located, and where you can jump too? Or would it use a brute force method and simply "click" on the screen and check what happens?

- Is there a way to tell what language a program was written in?

- For the algorithm portion, let's say you're making something to play Texas Holdem Poker automatically. If you, the programmer, aren't an expert exactly then how would you teach a computer (ie program) to play and win?

Generally, the file extention &/or platform it is being used in.


You would code logic. The program (computer) wouldn't make a decision, it would filter results based on comparisons to data.

Sorry but I'm new to programming and currently only taking VB 2005 & C++ classes. Both of the IDE's create .exe files and I'm not sure how I could tell an exe was a C++ or VB based program.




I'm not sure what the second part means, sorry. It's kind of hard to grasp for me because it seems like to make a good AI you'd have to be one yourself, especially if the game is mental (chess, card games) vs. physical like first person shooters etc.