Dashbot

This is a simple bot for Linux+X11 that automatically plays the game Diamond Dash, available on Facebook and Google+. It's performance depends a lot on your computer speed. My laptop generally scores around 500-800k, while my (faster) desktop can routinely score about 1300k.

Sample video of its operation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJeE-uOl700

Usage:

1. Open the game in your browser and go to the main menu. Make sure the full game window is visible.
2. Run the bot.
3. Hold down the right control key. This enables the bot. Anytime you release the ctrl key, the bot stops playing. (This is useful if you need to manually intervene. I like to release Ctrl when a diamond tile is clicked so that my bot doesn't go nuts while the meteor thingy is animating.)

About the algorithm: Before the game starts, dashbot scans the screen looking for the "Diamond Dash" logo. This tells him where to look for the tiles and the Play button.

1. dashbot takes a screenshot of the game playing area (the 8x9 grid where the tiles are).
2. dashbot looks at each 40x40 px section of the grid, comparing it to each of the 6 possible tiles.
3. dashbot identifies which tile is in each grid location. If he's unsure (animations can screw up the identification), he marks the tile as unknown.
4. dashbot goes through the identified grid and finds every cluster of 3 or more tiles on the board, leaving a 1-tile border around each cluster. The border is for "magic fire" mode, where adjacent tiles explode when you clear a cluster: we don't want to click on whatever took the place of the exploding tiles.
5. dashbot quickly clicks on 1 tile from each cluster he found, in succession. Note that he does this from top-left to bottom-right, so that he doesn't have to look at the screen again (tiles below or to the left/right of a cleared cluster are guaranteed to still be there).
6. dashbot takes a rest for 1/3 of a second to allow the new tiles to fall in from above. (The exact delay should be tuned for how fast your computer is. Slower computers might need a longer delay.)
7. Repeat steps 1-6.