We’ve had tens of thousands of people spotting nightjars and donating a bit of their time to sensory ecology research. The results of this (of course it’s still on-going, along with the new nest spotting game) is a 20Mb database with hundreds of thousands of clicks recorded. One of the things we were interested in was seeing what people were mistaking for the birds – so I had a go at visualising all the clicks over the images (these are all parts of the cropped image – as it really doesn’t compress well):
Then, looking through the results – I saw a strange artefact:
My first thought was that someone had tried cheating with a script, but I can hardly imagine that anyone would go to the bother and it’s only in one image. Perhaps some form of bot or scraping software agent – I thought that browser click automation was done by directly interpreting the web page? Perhaps it’s a fall back for HTML5 canvas elements?
It turns out it’s a single player (playing as a monkey, age 16 to 35 who had played before) – so easy enough to filter away, but in doing that I noticed the click order was not as regular as it looked, and it goes a bit wobbly in the middle:
Someone with very precise mouse skills then? 🙂
🙂 interesting example of cheating behaviour!
…and I like how (s)he also clicked through the tree, just in case!
Indeed. I think it’s still most likely to be a bot, but I can’t explain the inconsistencies :-/
Very strange how it shows just-almost bot behaviour!
perhaps it’s a bot with some not very refined random processes implemented to make it look more human…
perhaps someone is experimenting with a neural net, using the game to provide feedback, and it is in a mostly untrained state.