[nikcub]

It is different enough that it just looks like parallel thinking. I have been working on the same thing - breaking HQ, i'm certain that almost every hacker had the same thought when they first played the game - that it is possible to take a number of approaches to beat it or at least get some assistance to beat it.

edit: fwiw your post is more fleshed out and better, but OP had some interesting approaches to using the Search API for quick responses to the difficult class of questions. I feel bad for missing your original post

I have three techniques that i've implemented so far - the first is similar to what the two of you did with screenshots and OCR. The second is MITM based, and the third is probably the most interesting since it has a higher success rate and is much more difficult to defend against.

I started when it was 30k viewers per session but now it is up to almost a million and the lag has been bad

I might eventually publish some info - but I was interested also in the challenge of how you would defend against these schemes as HQ will need to be on the ball. I can imagine that, in the long-term, cheating will become a big problem and a competitive advantage they could have over the clone apps is the ability to guarantee to contestants that they're playing against other humans rather than against machines.

I believe that there are successful cheaters at the moment because the ratio of winners to participants (especially later stage participants) has worsened. I don't have enough hard data to prove that and it's mostly anecdotal but obtaining the data to back up that hypothesis shouldn't be too difficult (there used to be regular $100+ wins, today the win rate feels an order of magnitude higher)