Its not Hacking like in the movies
I didn’t break into anything or get around any security measures. I simply used code to do the heavy lifting for me😄.
The steps I took
The first thing I do when I am intrigued by a website is open the inspector and take a quick look at the HTML structure, maybe zooming in on a specific element's CSS classes. Then I start trying to figure out what it is built with, keeping in mind how the page loaded and how the pages thereafter appeared on my screen. With MathMax.io I immediately looked at the network traffic.
As I played the game I saw how there were no calls happening, therefore there is no backend 🤷. It would have been simple for me to talk to the backend from a C# console app, not a possibility anymore, so new tactic.
I started up Visual Studio and got going on a simple console app with Selenium. Looking at the page I saw that the two options had their own id tags, which is nice, no need for ugly findByClass methods😁.
I've got the values now, which is good, but I need to do the maths. I could have written my own methods to parse the text into math operations (converting × to * and ÷ to /) and then applying BODMAS/PEMDAS (Order of operations). And that is not something that I want to get stuck into.
After a quick google search I found a nuget package called Flee. I then created a test project to test the package out and was very happy with the results. 
I then progressed a bit further into the game to try and get all the operations out and realised that I needed to change some of the human friendly characters into symbols that Flee could understand.
Ready to go I ran my little Selenium/Console app and watched the points grow
In the video you will see me change the purpose of the app to getting every answer wrong on purpose. This is because during the recording I realised that I was accruing time for every correct answer at such a rate that I would have to wait 10min before I could see the end screen. So, I took the knock of the wrong answers, so that I could get to the end screen.
Source Code available at https://github.com/Khaoz-Topsy/MathMax.io-Selenium
