A little thing about Bingo Banko
I have recently heard about Bingo Banko, which appears to be a TV-show where you can print generated bingo (or banko) plates at home and play along while they pull the numbers on TV.
The limitations for the player is how many plates he can manage with his eyes and his hands. But hey! The plates is online generated – why not just generate a hell lot of plates and let the computer do all the work? You should be a sure winner in that case – the only problem will then be to get through with the phone call. And right now, they don’t mention anything about computer-help in their rules. The bingo plates have 27 fields and look like this:
I have recently made a (very very fast) custom designed OCR Engine for this purpose and another script for downloading 300 plates at a time. However in the middle of the development, I discovered that even though I download 300 plates, I only got about 11 unique plates. If I make 300 requests the next day, I get 11 more unique plates. Damnit!
To make a successfull robot-helper for BingoBanko, you have to make a cronjob that requests plates every day for a week or so. This way you will get so many unique plates as possible. Thereafter they should be put in the OCR engine and just needs a “player” to get ready next saturday 
And how do we then benefit from this ? Is this script and OCR software something that you want to share with me for example ?
Best regards
Leif
There isn’t necessarily a benefit in every blog post I publish, but special “prize for you my friend”! I don’t mind sharing my source code, and I have published my OCR Engine in a new post for you
Posted my OCR application for TV2 bingo banko here:
http://code.google.com/p/bingobanko-tv2/
Probably takes a “coder” to get to work, but maybe someone can make a nicer version – with a real GUI, and maybe we can even force TV2 to upgrade the security on their “game” ..
-Michael Toft