OSRS Bots - Some Thoughts

[Space Pirate]

This is not an endorsement of botting on OSRS just some thoughts on what would make a cool bot. If you love the game, don't bot it.

Tick-perfect (ish) commands for bot farms
By setting up your own clan for your bot farm you will be able to send commands to your bots almost tick-perfect in sync with the game-server.
The only use case i can see for this is when your farm is in the wilderness where your bots are somewhat close together. Think Air Orb charging; When a PK i spotted nearby, send a clan chat command to your bots and whoosh, all of them have hopped world.

Though Jagex would know all you bots if they detect one and investigate. This can be more secretive by using sentences instead, such as "just got Karil's Top".
This would be an easier method of communicating with your bots without setting up your own "command-server" to deliver commands.

The Second Wheel
This would have another bot in the same area of another bot talk with a predefined conversation to each other.
The conversation has to be able to be change out key words with items or locations dynamically to not trigger any of Jagex possible triggers and to hopefully fool them during an investigation. One thing that might be kind of fun would be to use CleverBot for conversations. Kinda risky though due to occasional nonsense it can spew out sometimes.

The AI Revolution
Me and @Shenandoah have talked about this to some degree, i feel like it's going to happen pretty soon if it haven't yet. Basically what you do is train the AI on a human playing the game then make the AI repeat what the human did without triggering Jagex bot detection software. This would be painstakingly time consuming to train as you would need tens if not hundreds of hours to train properly per method. I would think slayer would be the most difficult due to the variety of mobs and locations.

I assume that the first thing to be targeted would be Raids as they're instanced, minimal contact with players and a lot of gold per hour.
I feel this has the potential to go undetected by Jagex for quite some time and i suspect they're going to implement some kind of trust system for each player, and possible separate worlds or perks. Maybe it goes really downhill maybe separate economy for trusted players but i doubt it.

As a proof of concept SirPugger made a video about someone who made a PK bot for OSRS that is highly effective.

Now, tell me why my ideas are stupid

 

[Shenandoah]

I definitely think we'll see more narrow AIs emerge that do certain narrow tasks on Runescape like woodcutting, or training combat, or doing simple repetitive tasks where there aren't many variations in the observation data fed to the neural network from how it was trained.

One of the biggest problems so far is with the game itself. With a game like Runescape, there are so many different things you can do, so getting the Ai to play the game by itself is an AI-complete problem so for now, that's out of the question. But for tasks that do not require natural language processing to the point where only humans can understand them, I can definitely see an upsurge in AI bots in the next few years ahead.

For the issue of detecting these AI bots, I don't think it'll be that straightforward. I realize now, partly from having read OpenAI's paper on the Dota 2 bot, that feeding the neural network only visual data in the form of pixels as input might not work all that well because of the computing power required, so you'll probably have to set the observation data to some combination of different in-game data depending on what you want to do. A PKing bot might need data such as the health of the player, health of the enemy, what's in the inventory, and maybe some visual data as well. To retrieve this data, the only viable option that I see is by using Java Reflection which means we still need to interface with the client somehow. This basically puts us back where we started since there are already plenty of reflection bots out there. The good news is that reflection bots are very hard to detect.

However, I'm not ruling out completely visual-based AI bots yet; they might be a viable option but I just lack the knowledge for making them work. I'll have to take a deeper look at this for when I eventually write my AI tutorials, but needless to say, with the current progress in the field of machine learning, I'm very excited to see where we're heading next. Jagex might have to deal with a whole new type of bot being controlled by artificial intelligence, but Jagex can also utilize AI to battle them, which I suspect they're already doing for normal bots as well.