WorldWarBot 2020

About

WorldWarBot 2020 is a Facebook page used to post simulations of wars between nations randomly selected by a computer program.

History

On March 4th, 2019, the first result from a bot-simulated war was posted on the Facebook page. Within two months, the post received more than 500 reactions, 280 comments and 80 shares (shown below).^[3]

The official Facebook Group WorldWarBot PortalPosting was created on March 8th, 2019^[1].

The main page reached 100,000 Likes on March 24th, 2019. In response to the success, two official spin-off bots were launched: CivilWarBot 2020^[4] and ItaliaGuerraBot 2020.^[5] Along with this, many fan-made versions, such as "Argentina War Bot 1810^[6] and MyHouse WarBot 2020^[7] were created.

On April 24th, 2019 the main page reached 200,000 Likes. Because it had been a popular request, a Twitter account for the Bot was created.

The 300,000 Likes milestone was reached on May 12th 2021 during the fourth run.

Features

On March 21st, 2019, a description for how the bot works was posted on the Facebook page.^[2] The description states:

• This is an automatic bot that randomly generates posts, this is not an interactive bot (not yet, at least) so you can’t send request to have a specific outcome
• I started from the map linked below, so I didn’t decide who owns any disputed area and I’m not going to change it. This is a game and those areas are probably going to get conquered by someone else anyway, so don’t take it bad.
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/110m-cultural-vectors/
• Every country is considered a sovereign territory, so countries like Greenland and New Caledonia are free. The only exception I’m aware of is French Guyana because it’s part of the same shape in the map and I didn’t realize that at first. I’ll change it for the next run.
• It chooses one random “territory”, calculates its centroid (average position of all the points in the figure) and then searches the closest centroid from territories not controlled by the same sovereign country. This mean that the chances of a country to be chosen as attacker are equal to the number of territories it controls.
• At the moment distance calculation is bugged and caused crazy thing like Antarctica conquering Russia. I already have a solution for that but I let the people choose and decided to keep the bugged version for this run. It will be fixed in the next one.

Under any given post about a country conquering a territory, the current Top 10 countries by territories controlled are listed.

Highlights

First Run

The first run of the Bot started on March 4th, 2019 with Pakistan conquering Tajikistan. Notable events included the “settlement” of many real-life conflicts, such as Israel conquering Palestine, Ireland conquering the UK, the Falkland Islands conquering Argentina and North Korea conquering South Korea.

Due to a bug when calculating the centroid of a territory, countries were able to conquer territories, which they do not directly border. This happened when Bangladesh conquered Russia. In-universe, this was jokingly explained as Bangladesh having developed "Portal" technology. This happened again when Antarctica conquered Russia. This, along with Antarctica conquering more and more territories, gave rise to the "Penguin Overlords," Noot Noot and “Holy Antarctic Empire” jokes within the fanbase. Other repeated jokes from the fan base include Lesotho being Wakanda from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Niger being called [REDACTED] to avoid the page being banned from Facebook, a boring back and forth between two countries being called “Ping Pong” and PewdiePie´s 9-Year-Old Army fighting for Sweden.

The last 10 countries remaining were: Paraguay, Lesotho, Syria, Antarctica, Sweden, New Caledonia, North Korea, "[REDACTED]" (a.k.a. Niger), Algeria and Mali. Other fan-favorite countries include Brunei, Poland, the United States of America and French Southern and Antarctic Lands.

On April 18th, 2019, the official WorldWarBot 2020 YouTube shared a video recap of the First Run. Within one week, the post received more than 10,000 views.

Second Run

In preparation for the Second Run, several changes were made. Some of them include fixing the Portal Bug, adding new smaller territories and overworking the centroid system. Also a revolt mechanic was added so that territories under a foreign countries control can gain their independence back. In a Facebook post the Civil War Bot explained the updates (shown below, left).

The second run of the Bot started on April 20th, 2019 with the Isle of Man conquering England. (Facebook Post Below, right)

Notable events again included many historical and recent conflicts being featured, like Japan conquering the Korean peninsular, Austria conquering Czechia and Slovenia and Mexico conquering the United States. The first country to rebel and gain it´s independence back was Vietnam, who rose against Laos. Later the Netherlands and Bulgaria rose against Spain.

The last 10 countries remaining were: Spain, El Salvador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Pitcairn Islands, Kyrgyzstan,Georgia, Bahrain, Japan and Serbia.

Third Run

With no updates from the Bots Admin, the Facebook page stayed silent for more than half a year, until the third run was announced on March 26th, 2020, just over a year after the first run started.

The third run began a day later on March 27th, 2020 with the United Stated of America conquering Canada.

In comparison to the runs before the visuals got improved and the list of competing countries slightly altered. Also the revolt mechanic was got changed so that countries that revolt can take other countries (with the same current overlords) with them. The first country to do so was Bahamas, which revolted against the Cayman Islands and took Cuba with it. Another change to the mechanic was the "deliberate" use of "Portal technology", meaning that there is a small chance that a country can conquer a territory anywhere on earth. The first use of this happened when Liberia conquered Liechtenstein.

Notable events included 3-way Ping pong matches for control of the Isle of Man and Argentina, Palestine conquering Israel and the post in which Germany conquered Luxembourg getting zucced, leading to Germany getting it´s name [REDACTED] as well. To choose Germanys new name a poll was held in the official group which resulted in [APOLOGY] being chosen (Shown below on the left). On April 2nd, 2020, just a day after the Germany incident, the Twitter account got suspended (Shown below on the right). The same evening the Admin announced that the Bot will be paused for one day because of the shadowbans and personal stuff he has to deal with. In reality the bot was paused for 4 days and continued on April 6th.

With all the drama going on around Germany it was no surprise that many Third Reich and Anschluss jokes were made once [Apology] conquered most counties around it including the BeNeLux, Switzerland, Czechia, Austria and even England. As of April 12th it had reached the Top10 leader board in therms of territories under it´s control.

The last 10 counties remaining were: Malaysia, Suriname, Sweden, Cameroon, Botswana, France, Palestine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tunisia and Antarctica.

Forth Run

After almost a year with no activity the forth run was announced on March 18th 2021 and began on March 24th 2021 with Bulgaria conquering Macedonia.

While the territories stayed mostly the same as in the third run, a new mechanic was added: Non-aggression pacts. The odds for this to happen are similarly small as for riots. Still the first of these was singed within the first day of the run between Croatia and Slovenia. Also within the first day of the run, Azerbaijan conquered Armenia, which reminded many of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, which had taken place just a few months prior. Other Notable events included Northern Ireland conquering the Republic of Ireland, Canada conquering the USA, only for it to be conquered by Svalbard and Jan Mayen later and Luxembourg conquering Germany exactly 1 year, 1 month and 1 day after the [Apology] incident. A second Non-aggression Pact was singed later in the run between Antarctica and The Democratic Republic of the Kongo on May 22nd, only to be broken by Antarctica a day later. Meanwhile Luxembourg was nearly defeated but came bay to conquer all of the former Austro-Hungarian territories and Vietnam became a huge empire by the time most other nations were only half it´s size. As many of the big players of the old runs were defeated early on, the fanbase developed new country specific jokes, such as Svalbard and Jan Mayen fighting with polar bears (as opposed to Antarctica, which fights with penguins) or St. Helena being lead by Zombie Napoleon.

The last 10 countries remaining were: Vietnam, Peru, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luxembourg, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Portugal, Estonia, Libya, Pitcairn Islands and Scotland.

The third Non-aggression Pact of the run was created between Vietnam and The Democratic Republic of the Congo, two of the late-game superpowers. It was broken by Vietnam and then later the fourth Non-aggression Pact of the run was also singed between these two and only broken by Vietnam when Congo and them were the last Countries standing.

Search Interest

External References