just a question. Do you want this game to be bottable or not?
It is inevitable, basically. You can never make a game that can not be played by bots, you can only ever hope to make a game that is sufficiently difficult that bots cannot drastically outperform.
Do you want peeps out there to 'mine' with bots or do you really want it to be proof of play. Because it wouldn't be play if people used bots.
It is still play, it is just a sort of meta-game.
One solution layer to a layered cake of anti-bot solutions would be to have some feedback loop to see if the 'player' is acting too perfectly, too efficiently. I mean humans make mistakes right, and bots go for optimal, 100% efficiency right.
This is related to the difficulty time warp attack. The attack is basically only possible because you (where you is either a human or bot miner) can actually be well above 100% efficient, in a sense. Players in the reference client have some ability to warp in-game time, but the network itself allows in-game time to be warped relative to wall clock time much much more than it should.
Otherwise people would have to design crappier bots in order to not be slated off for being too good by the kill-the-bot scanner, or something... of course this will only be an important point once the game reaches public spheres, and if people like it enough to play it for money; if its too annoying and frustrating only a coupe of die hard nuts will be wiggling away their thumbs all day, trying to mine.
The problem is that there is no systematic way to draw the line that doesn't lead to a lot of human players being falsely flagged. Why should I want to improve as a skilled player if I know that at some level of mastery I'll be cut off from my reward for being "too successful." Who wants to play a game where they lose for winning?
So proof of play is really just proof-of-being-able-to-install-a-bot-to-pretend-to-play currency... would be great to be proof of play. I mean if the 'player' is 100% efficient the game should kick them out, no human being is 100% perfect, only Jesus was perfect, right, although he did moan on the cross...
what if this level fluctuates (the level that actively assesses player perfectability - i.e if played too perfect, the game does not give reward... This level could fluctuate so bot programmers couldn't know exactly the optimal level at which to set their bots... of course the devs would know...)...
We should not want to centralize the network in any way. If the devs "get to know" they also get to just tune their bots to be the only productive bots on the network (since they hold the secret magic numbers to tune against) and dominate the mining process. This would certainly be no good for what are, hopefully, self evident reasons.
the perfect information on the game side would be unaffected while only the input would be assessed from the 'player' side. Inhuman efficiency can quickly be barred from gaining reward... couldn't that be a criteria that doesn't affect perfect information?
You can't formally define "inhuman efficiency" for the network to measure against. If you can't formally define/codify it, you can't really have the network establish proof based upon it. This holds for any kind of "proof of whatever" system. (In other words, something like "proof of swag" can never really work, because machines can't independently verify a precise measure of swag. Even a skilled professional swag assessor probably couldn't reasonably define "too much swag to be human generated swag.") Because of this, we have to keep to a seemingly peculiar, but actually quite sensible, definition of "play" in order for things to work out.
Sorry for dumb questions but I'd love to understand... why my stupid ideas won't work, it makes me understand blockchains and proof of play better, I'm a total Nuub...
I'd start by reading and re-reading (over and over again until it all seems "obvious") the satoshi whitepaper and the protocol notes on the wiki.
p.s i has a windows 3x2.6 ghz w/ 4 gig ram and ur laptop w/ 2gig ram, i could run miners or something for yaz, if needed.. lol... plz let me, i donno how to install, let me halp stabilize the network! i has another pc, too, that makes 3! I have linux and windoze...
I'm sure there will be easier miner setups and mining pools before long. I hope to eventually launch an easy-to-use pool which will offer some basic bot algorithms. In the meantime, minim1ner's bot is not hard to use if you already have linux boxes handy.