SRL Botwatch Competition
March 8, 2014 - June 7, 2014
Overview
As a community that develops and uses ‘bot’ technology, it is easy to get caught up in speculation and theories regarding the feasible capabilities of various bot detection methods. Not only that, but misconceptions and misinformation spread and influence the development of various scripts and of SRL itself.
To combat this, the SRL staff would like to propose a challenge to the community, in order to encourage real research and a deeper understanding of the capabilities and limitations of modern technologies.
Your task is to design and justify a system to detect bots in the game Runescape. You’re free to use any and all resources at your disposal. The final product will consist of a paper that fully describes your approach, as well as a slideshow presentation to a panel of judges that will consist of SRL Staff members as well as real industry professionals. Not only will this provide you with a good knowledge of modern data technologies, but can also be added to your resume and used as a conversation topic in future interviews.
Schedule*
- Competition Posted - March 8
- Proposal (2 Weeks) - March 23 - Submission Form (Plain text only, no links)
- Eligibility Responses (5 Days) - March 23 - 29
- Paper Draft (5 Weeks) - May 4 (Extended by 1 week from original April 27 deadline)
- Paper Final (2 Weeks) - May 18
- Presentations (2 Weeks) - May 19 - June 1 (Flexible with finals/schedules)
- Results Announced (1 Week) - June 7
Note: Staff reserve the right to change or modify deadlines at any time for any reason.
*All dates imply 23:59 UTC unless otherwise noted
Eligibility
- Submit short (half page) proposal
- Ranks Jr. Member+ (Jr. must submit full page proposal)
- Sporadic Targeted Interviews
- Small groups allowed if all members qualify otherwise**
- SSRL / Developer / Super Mod ranks automatically qualify
Note: Staff reserve the right to perform supplementary eligibility interviews as well as the right to allow or deny participation of anyone for any reason.
**Final submission should reflect that of a group (proportionally more research and depth)
Prizes
- SRL Scholar Rank (new!) - More Details
- SRL Swag (Shirt/Mug/Etc)
- More awesome prizes announced soon!
Requirements
- Data
- What data needs to be collected and how?
- How will this data be stored?
- How will this impact the end users?
- Analysis
- How will the data be analyzed?
- What to look for?
- System
- What are the hardware and software requirements for the system?
- What is the labour required to create/maintain the system (Dev, SA, Analyst, etc)?
- Cost
- What is the cost of the system?
- What is the cost on human resources?
- What are the costs of expansion?
- Future
- Growth/Expansion/Adaptability
- Industry competition
- Misc
- Must justify all of the decisions made
- Cite and reference all used sources
Note: This is a list of minimums, you are encouraged to go above and beyond what is in this list.
Restrictions
- Max cost 1% of Jagex 2012 Earnings (£50 Million earned, GBP£500k cap (USD$837k))
- Must use 100% currently existing technology
- Must be able to be managed by a small team of employees (~1% of 450 total employees)
Evaluation Guidelines / Process
- Paper
- Recommended IEEE Publishing Template
- Bonus points for LaTeX
- MS Word/ODF documents must use the recommended template
- Submitted as both PDF/PostScript and source document (.tex,.doc,.bst, etc)
- Concrete judging rubric to be determined
- Slides
- Provide general overview, mostly as a tool for presentation
- Presentation
- Present slides to judging panel
Resources