Fighting Bots with Python and Machine Learning

NIDC 2022

About me!

• I really like parrots
• No, I really like parrots
• Apart from parrots, I really like Python and I play a lot of online games (Ballymena internet permitting)
• I don't really use Twitter much so
  nowhere to send hate mail :(

• I made some new friends who also played
• One of them noted a problem he was having
• Bots, bots bots

• It is very hard to even get to Iron in the first place
• Why spend manual time and effort when you can just code a bot to do your dirty work?
• Manual derankers exist

How to even spot a bot?

• They share several characteristics
• Queue only in the support role
• Tend to pick champions that can sit back and heal

• Since we have some common characteristics for these bots...
• ...that means we can categorise them using ML
• First things first, getting the data

• So, what do we need to collect?
• Summoner name (aka player name)
• Region the player is in
• Champions played
• Their overall winrate
• Their summoner spells
• Weird rune choices?

• Create a CSV with the aforementioned fields....
• ...and now the fun part
• aka: Someone who failed their Maths GCSE twice and is not very good at maths tries to understand Machine Learning

• Looking at what others have done before is always a good starting point!
• Basic tutorials are also a good starting point, but I don't want to categorise plants for the millionth time, I want to categorise BOTS
• Looked into folks categorising things like Twitter bots...

• To train the actual model, I made a CSV of actual confirmed bots
• I used XGBClassifier's model, part of XGBoost to classify them
• SKLearn
• Pandas!
• How to find them you may ask?
• op.gg