Show HN: Hormuz Havoc, a satirical game that got overrun by AI bots in 24 hours
I built a satirical browser game to share with friends (Hormuz Havoc: you play an American president managing a crisis in the Middle East, only "loosely" inspired by current events). I had good fun making this, but that's not necessarily the interesting part. The interesting part was that within a few hours of sharing it with my friends, some of them set about trying to overrun the leaderboard by launching a swarm of AI bots to learn the game and figure out how to get the highest score. This set off a game of cat-and-mouse as they found vulnerabilities and I tried patching them. Within hours of sharing, someone used the Claude browser extension to read game.js directly. Large parts of the scoring formula, action effect values, and bonus thresholds were sitting in client-side JavaScript - this was a trivial thing even a human could've found, but a human would've still had to play the game, whereas the AI bot just optimised directly against the scoring formula. It meant that the first AI
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