FreeRice

If you have been a regular visitor to irc.idlemonkeys.net, probably you have heard about FreeRice, a website that donates rice to poor people in the world.

The rule is simple: for each word you get right, 10 grains of rice is donated to help end world hunger.

During the conversation on #hackquest, some of the geeks showed the desire to save humanity by creating a learning bot (to be exact, a memorizing bot) that plays the game and helps donate the rice. SilentNutcracker and alt3rn4tiv3 started the first implementation of the game. It is built on top of php, curl and mysql.

As a super botter, I could not let them enjoy the fun alone. So I created a similar bot, written in Java. You can grab a copy from my website.

Unlike their version, my bot uses serialized data, without any need for a DBMS. So you only need JRE 5 to get the bot up and running :)

However, I've always been wondering, does botting really help donating rice? I guess that's only true to a certain extend. If too many people launch the bot, it'll be no different from a DDOS attack, and the FreeRice people surely won't like it. So you might want to adjust some settings in freerice.properties to make sure that the bot won't hurt the server too much :P