2.1 KiB
| title | template | slug | repo | summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wiki Game solver | projects | wiki-game-solver | https://gist.github.com/RealOrangeOne/7da9a3dd1bf90ecdf7be | Simple script to win the Wiki Game |
The Wiki Game is an online game where you attempt to navigate through wikipedia from a start page to a goal page using as few other pages as possible.
Not long after I was shown the it, I realised that I really wasn't very good at it. After about 15 minutes of coming in last place all the time, I started to wonder how it worked, and how I could beat it.
As it turns out, it really isn't very hard! It does require injecting some JS into the page, but it's not that much.
Usage
- Start a new game, don't press start!
- Open your browser's developer console. This will vary from browser.
- Paste the compact version of the code (
wiki-game-solver.min.js), and execute it (press enter) - Congratulations, you just won!
How it works
The game isn't open source, so I couldn't see how the back end worked, but after playing a few games and checking what happened on the page, I worked out what it was doing.
The game was won when the iframe was at the final page location, or at least a clone of it on their servers with some extra querystring information.
With this, I started to write something that would change the location of the iframe to the goal. Fortunately for me, the goal url was on the page. So all it took was a little mutative switcheroo to win!
Source
The source for this was written in pure JS, and relies heavily on the fact that the wiki game uses jQuery so I can plug into components and events really easily. The code can be found in the GitHub gists below. Both the standard and compact versions are available.
Disclaimer
As I experienced whilst developing this, the people that play Wiki Game don't tend to like people cheating. There were a lot of people getting very annoyed whilst I was developing and testing. So please use this at your own risk! At the moment I don't think there is any kind of banning system, but be warned!