When I talk about bots with people, they usually see some machine replacing people (and destroying something). They miss that a bot is nothing more than a sophisticated algorithm. It seems hard to understand that a manual (= simple algorithm) can be automated (= script) and one can let it work the whole day.

A good example is Pokemon Go: When it came out, I stumbled upon a good API documentation. Two hours later I finished a teleporter/PokeStop-farmer. I made soo many levels in one night. Later it occured to me to google “pokemon go bot” and I found a better one. (I removed mine from Github since people didn’t stop asking about fixing it and adding features)

Here a picture of the sophisticated Pokemon Go bot doing its work:

<img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-340" src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Untitled-300x247.png" alt="PokeBot" width="650" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />

It acts like a player: Walking around, collecting things, catching pokemons, throwing away unused stuff etc. They left out Gym battles, but that would be possible too. As lazy as I am, I’m happy I don’t have to walk around to catch stupid virtual pets (sorry, but the game lacks too much to be good). By now I’m level 28, have a Pokedex of 115 and haven’t touched the app for more than about two hours.

Another of my bots is this one. It’s built to collect points on this website. With the points one then can “buy” stuff. It’s built on Selenium (a tool used to automate browser testing):

(I won’t publish this code because some people may have a problem with this bot. It’s not against the terms of use so far.)

I have some bots running which collect things for me, register me for competitions or inform me on certain events. They are low maintenance and give me some free entries and stuff every year. But mostly they are fun to talk about. :)

(I could go deeper into the topic of automation of certain work, especially since I’ve seen how some lawyers/law people work. They kind of still neglect computers and the internet. But people will take this as a political statement.)