Diogo Mónica made a reservation bot to secure a table at his favourite San Francisco restaurant.
Diogo Mónica made a reservation botto secure a table at his favourite San Francisco restaurant.
Mónica first ran a script to probe the restaurant’s online reservation service for new availability and noticed that space became available at 4am but would be fully booked again by 4.01am. He deduced that at this speed the reservations were being processed by bots.
He then proceeded to write his own bot to compete in what he calls a Bot War Arms Race, similar to the bot wars in High Frequency Trading. He has made the source code available and explains:
I used mechanize to create a simple ruby script that goes through the process of checking for available reservations (in a given time range) and making a reservation under your name.
With this script I was able to start getting reservations again, but I know that this bot war will continue to escalate. Expect future posts on how I will adapt my strategies as the arms race continues to heat up.