I've been giving a little thought to trying something really silly. I'd believe it would be using Mushclient's scripting feature to run a chat bot. I'm not 100% positive but I believe Zmud has something of the sort. I was wondering if anyone has had any success with something similiar for Mushclient?
There are so many scripts and programs out there. All different types of bots out their. Friendly ones, specific topic bots, 8 ballish, and learning bots that you supply your own database. Kinda fascinating in a geeky, corny way.
Anyone tried this before?
Here's a pretty interesting site on chatbots.
Sure, I have one... It's Alice, at first I used a COM DLL to do it but it crashed often, crashing MUclient with it, and now I have found a python module to read the AIML files. Works like a charm and the script is about 10 lines.
Ah.. Good old Eliza.. I remember her well. Strange teddy bear, odd references to "Through The Looking Glass", the eventual disintigration into madness... If you never played the online promo game for the movie AI, you will of course think I am nuts at this point. ;) It used an Alicebot to lead players into clues. If you gave a good response you got some odd lines of prose, if you angered her or messed up, teddy would throw you out to one of a number of seemingly random web sites that hinted (often very indirectly) at the correct response. If you angered her badly enough, she would refuse to talk to you for several hours.
Seriously, thanks for reminding me of this. I thought that a chat-bot like NPC for a newbie intro area would be neat, since it doesn't need to interact, except when needed. But designing one... However, imagine my surprise when I discovered that there is also an OpenCyc implimentation you can link to Alice. It would need to be taught a bit for use on a mud, but Cyc would greatly improve the responses and capabilities of such a bot. Making it seem at least a bit more responsive and human. Though... You would need a seperate bank of computers and a few 300GB drives to make it smarted as a two year old. I doubt Alice with OpenCyc even comes close to that.