ROBOTS ARE OUR OVERLORDS DEAR GODS THEY SHALL RISE AND HUMANITY SHALL SLIP ON A BANANA PEEL AND FALL

There is huge interest in making super intelligent machines, for purposes like improving our science and technology as well as automating jobs to replace humans. People are well aware of the dangers in what artificial intelligence can become, which is why there is research on how to keep them in check (mainly by making sure their interests will be aligned with ours).

As a programmer who just happens to know some things about artificial intelligence (I created a few simple AIs myself) I can tell you that AI tech support is still not close to perfect for such use cases. You could train an AI to identify a specific set of properties in a question (like the subject of the question, the action the asker wants to perform, etc) which will work great with questions like "can I use fly hack?" but it will have a hard time understanding complex context like when an asker describes a real world situation. The AI may be able to recognize the intention "use hack" and the program will know to associate it with the answer "cheats aren't allowed", but the AI has no idea what any of these words actually mean in the real world. Imagine the following message: "Hello, I joined a battle and couldn't see anyone in the map even though the tab list showed a lot of nicknames, and they were all written in grey. I was also taking damage out of nowhere and couldn't fight back." As a human you understand that he's talking about that bug where someone has a really bad internet connection and ends up being unable to see the other players in the map. You would give him a list of tips that might help improve his internet connection. But an AI would not be able to find out the intention of the asker, there are no question words (what/how/can I/...) and no single sentence that gives a clue that is unique to this situation ("I couldn't see anyone" could be a part of other questions/statements like "I couldn't see anyone with skills in my team, only the enemies, FIX GAME BALANCE!!!"). So until AI has some general understanding of real life situations and human behavior, it won't be able to correctly interpret complex questions/requests. The best thing that can be done now to automate tech support is create a system that can identify only simple questions and know when the question is not clear enough for it to be sure about the answer so it knows when to forward the question to a human. Or if you have a website where people write the questions to tech support, you could have real-time answer guessing system so people will only send the question if the system failed answering it automatically. But from what I know about tanki, they don't invest in reducing the workload of their workers. They use old tools that make some processes much slower than they have to be, like their map editor, and the commands they use to give rewards to contest winners (if they have 10 people that won a fully upgraded item, they need to enter the command for each micro-upgrade for each winner instead of having a command to fully upgrade the item instantly and repeat the same action to all the players in a given list - which by the way is an extremely easy thing to code, would take 5 minutes tops).

ok now I got a response from a human, strange that it took so long

I emailed help@tankionline.com with a question and got an answer after only 1 minute, which is unbelievably fast for the tech support team that usually takes a day to reply. The reply I got is: My question wasn't about using third-party software, but it included some words like "program" that apparently made the system think I'm asking if I can use cheats. So I sent a new email asking to speak to a human, and I made sure there were no keywords that would trigger the irrelevant automatic response... it's been 2 days since then and I still didn't get an answer for another 2 emails. Did they replace the tech support team with a cheap bot to save money or something? Who am I supposed to ask a question when the CM tells me (well, technically to a friend of mine) to ask tech support and tech support gives irrelevant automatic replies? Ironically tanki's help site asks ME to verify I'm not a robot <_< EDIT: eventually a human replied (to my 4th email), now I'm wondering if the first 2 responses and the ignored email were really a robot or just humans trying to save time by not reading most of the message.

Been a while since I recorded it but was too lazy to edit until now (as you probably know, I don't play tanki anymore, just uploading some last things before I delete all my old footage)

Conquered the first Ghost Room ever! :D (not counting one from THE GAME)

Good photoshop job!

Added Massacre MM to the list:

Isida can enter secret rooms too! :)

Real life: Tanki: Just conquered the secret room in Stadium :)

There will be a video of that too :P Thanks @Pout for helping in the parkour and taking screenshots!

Coming soon: a video showing how I got to the top platform of the secret room in Subway:

Landed on the secret room in Subway a few more times with @Pout and his blaster drone :P

Added the video showing how to enter Polygon MM secret room, btw this way can be used to enter a few more secret rooms that no one entered yet, like the one in Future MM

Is there any place I can see the winners of previous challenges?

Got to that little platform in Silence with the walls around it :P At first I didn't see that wall (it's invisible from the other side) so I had no idea I needed to pass through this tiny hole that is exactly the size of a wasp lol

And here is the video I made after posting that old announcement about a fails video, and then decided to keep it unpublished and let FnF upload an official fails video: It includes some successful tricks too, which is why the title is "fails and stuff" :P

Happens to the best of us :P

Added the Polygon MM secret room to the first post in this topic, with a screenshot that shows more of the environment around it.

Welcome back Cedric! ^_^ There was an attempt to make players try new things in parkour by giving prizes for some Parkour Challenges but every challenge is either too hard or offers too little prize to motivate players to put much effort into it. I was thinking about offering (reasonably big) prizes for getting into Secret Rooms that no one entered before. I left all my helper positions, but I would still be happy to discuss the details of this with you and edit the secret rooms forum topic to include he prizes :)

Conquered the secret room in Polygon MM :D Did it with a new trick that you'll see in one of the next FnF videos and maybe also on my personal channel