Indie developers build robot that plays Threes perfectly

Newsbrief: The Arizona-based indue duo Team Colorblind have a robot that's programmed to play Threes perfectly, and they're streaming it doing so on their Twitch channel today. The robot -- which appears to be just a pair of appendages hooked up to a computer running a program designed to be the perfect Threes player -- was cobbled together by Matthew Wegner, a high-profile independent developer (and former head of Flashbang Studios) who co-founded Team Colorblind with Ben Ruiz. The AI was designed by Walt Destler, the co-creator of the IGF Award-winning online cooperative game Way. "I didn't write the AI core, but I did rig it up to an Arduino so it can control an actual iPad, and did the work to read the screenshots to get game state," Wegner told Gamasutra via email. "My motivation was actually winning a score competition with a friend -- I showed her what I did, so we decided it was a tie."

Wegner has agreed to share further details of the robot's design and construction with Gamasutra soon.