Can this online highscore scheme be abused?

Background

One problem with games using online highscore lists is that they often can be abused. The game sends the current score to the server and a cunning user can analyze the protocol/scheme and send bogus scores. That is why some highscore lists are topped with 999999 scores.

A common solution to this problem is to encrypt the score in some way, and on top of that put other mechanisms to recognize false scores. But even if you do this, it's the client that sends the score and the client is living in the user's computer and can be reverse-engineered.

My idea

I am designing/thinking about a game (that I will complete, yeah right :) ) where you configure your player/robot with instructions on how to perform a task (and when these instructions are to be carried out). When a "Go" button is pressed the game runs the instructions. Finally a result and, if successful, a score, is obtained.

So, how about this: Instead of submitting the score, the actual instructions are sent to the server, where they are run, using the same implementation. Then the server calculates the score and places the user on the highscore list.

The question

Are there ways this idea can be abused to get a false score?

I understand that this probably is not a new idea. But if it works, it wouldn't be impossible to extend it to other games too, 开发者_高级运维where it is possible to record all user actions.

People will always find a way to cheat, but this seems like a reasonable counter measure. You'll have to consider your intended traffic levels as your scheme will require more resources than if it was just recording the high score sent by the client.

But, as an aside - this game sounds an awful lot like my job (giving instructions to a machine so it performs some task). No high-score board though (although, that would be awesome).

as long as the robot program's behavior doesn't depend on the speed of the computer it'll be fine and if the programs are quite small at most a few kilobytes this would work fine; the only way i can see to cheat it is if one cloned the work space and ran a program to find the optimal program for the robot and then put it in and submitted it or if some one posted the solutions, and people used that but both of those issues can be solved with randomization.

(a note about the issue of speed dependent games, it's fine for the game to uniformly slow down if the computer can't run it at full speed but if the physics time step depends on the frame rate, you can get problems like the jump height varying with the frame rate)