> I have not actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++ and wrapping a websocket client in R.

I always assumed detours like that (assuming you are referring to doing/starting that because of the game) would be one of the most useful benefits to playing. It forces you to have to explore areas that you might not normally get into based on your job and interests.

Completely, its been a lot of fun, and I surprised myself by enjoying reading the RFC (full disclosure, I always liked doing that).

That's what I'm taking it as a license to do. I mostly do statistics/analysis for a living, so building automated systems is pretty new (and fun) for me.

How'd you go with wrapping the websocket client in R? I've been putting together an R client and am stuck on how to do the websocket given the lack of R websocket libraries.

I think your best bet is wrapping an existing C++ library using RCpp[1] that will require some work but I hope not too much.

[1] I would have really liked that as I ended up writing all data to SQLite and then imported it to R for analysis. Not the most elegant solution...

That is exactly what I am (currently) doing. Its actually a little tricky because of the stream-like nature of websockets. Currently I'm just writing to a file, but ideally I'd like to use the R connection API. The issue with that is that there doesn't appear to be a Rcpp wrapper around that particular API so I may have to do that (or test my theories by just using scan to read from the file after using a c++ binary to write it (using system).

Its a dirty hack, but appears to work.

FWIW, websocketpp is the C++ library I'm using.

Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it could be worse: I wrote all the data to a csv file and then imported into Excel for analysis.