Google’s hacking and anti-abuse research lead Elie Bursztein is a man who knows about internet security. He also knows how to cheat at computer card games.
In a recent blog post Bursztein explained how he managed to crack open Blizzard’s Hearthstone, using “data analysis” and ”machine learning” to predict his opponents’ decks. I don’t know what machine learning is but it sounds very exciting.
The hacking wizard first detailed his methods at Defcon 22 in August. Originally he was going to release his predictive software to the public, but unsurprisingly Blizzard weren’t too keen on that, and managed to talk him out of it. The company remains “very supportive” of his work apparently, but were understandably worried about hordes of tooled out data analyzers descending on Hearthstone.
”It was a difficult decision ’” I invested a lot of our time building our real-time dashboard tool with Celine ’” but we agree with the Hearthstone team and will not release the tool publicly,” explained Bursztein.
Instead you can read an in-depth breakdown of his work and theories here, and if you’re not computer illiterate like me you can try to make sense out of either. I think I’ll stick to losing badly in the traditional manner, thanks very much.
You can also find the presentation slides from Defcon here, if you’re interested. My attention wavered at around the tenth slide.
