It’s true, Uli Kilian is a genius. Earning a Guinness World Record in 2011 for solving 100 Rubik’s cubes during the London Marathon, the man is hailed worldwide for his wit. His newest project, however, is what he calls rudimentary – a Lego robot that plays free-to-play games for him while he sleeps. It all began when Kilian was playing Jurassic Park Builder, an F2P iPad game that requires the gamer to tap the dinosaurs on the screen every few minutes to earn in-game currency. For gamers who don’t want to waste precious time better-spent-doing-anything-else-really, they can dish out real-world dollars to advance in the game to higher levels. Kilian, instead, decided to take a different route.
He decided the required tapping could easily be automated, as the screen needs to be tapped every few minutes. The Rubik’s cube genius thus built a Lego robot to do his F2P game bidding during the night while he got his beauty sleep.
The robot was build using an older iPad, mounted on top of a Technics wheel. The entire unit is powered by an Arduino board, connected to a nearby laptop with a Windows OS. Atop the board sits a Lego robot, which nods back and forth, tapping the iPad screen every so often with an Arduino ground pin wrapped in tin foil, simulating human touch.
Put simply, while Kilian sleeps, a motor slides the iPad screen back and forth, positioning it so when the Lego robot taps the screen, it taps the desired area. In the game, Killian has a row of 11 dinosaurs, which each generate game money every five minutes. By the time the 3D artist wakes up in the morning, the Lego has collected hundreds of thousands of coins for him. Good boy. Kilian said he heard about the Arduino board only two weeks before he built his Lego robot and assures everyone that its the type of simple design that anyone can do (anyone that’s smart enough to solve a Rubik’s cube maybe).
Regardless, it’s a genius form of cheating and although it’s just a tad bit dishonest, who really wants to waste weeks of their life collecting coins for FarmVille or any other F2P game? Not Kilian and certainly not us. Cheat on gamers, cheat on.
C
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