Lights On, Nobody Home Yur Bot Can Spel Betern U (Okay, this is beyond what the BotBot can handle for now)

The most famous type of chat bots are, well, chatterbots. Eliza, Julia, and Newt in the outside world. Ratbot and Harry in the Palace world. A chatterbot pretends it's somebody it listens, it watches, and it talks.

Who needs artificial intelligence,
when you can have an artificial personality?

There are three ways to trigger a chatterbot into doing something, and one of them is cheating.

1. Have it respond to something someone said, via the ON INCHAT handler.
2. Put it on a (possibly random) timer, so that if no one talks to it, it will eventually start talking on its own.
3. You tell it to talk via an OUTCHAT command. But that's cheating, you're telling it what to do. A real chatterbot should be allowed to make a fool of itself (and you, by extension) autonomously.
4. I may be mistaken, but I think that Ratbot uses a fourth method, unavailable to mere mortals: it responds to whispered messages sent to it by the Wheel of Cheese room. That way, the room can catch events like ON ENTER which Ratbot wouldn't normally be able to trap.

CHATSTR LOWERCASE lowchat = WHOCHAT WHOME == NOT notMe = WHOCHAT WHONAME whom = ; identify Guests, filter the word "Guest" off speaker's name 0 isG = { "$1" GREPSUB whom = { [ "Tennis Ball " "BubbleHead " "Nonmember " "Freeloader " "Guest " ] 5 RANDOM GET whom & whom = } 10 RANDOM 4 == IF 1 isG = } WHOCHAT WHONAME "Guest ([0-9]*)" GREPSTR IF ; You Talkin' to Me? lowchat " doc,*\.*,*X" GREPSTR lowchat " dr\.*$" GREPSTR OR lowchat " [xz][ei]nu,*\.*" GREPSTR OR lowchat " x[.!]*$" GREPSTR OR lowchat "^x[.!]*$" GREPSTR OR lowchat " dr[aeiou]" GREPSTR NOT AND aboutMe = ; You sayin Hello? lowchat "hello,*" GREPSTR lowchat "hi,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "hiya,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "^hey,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "greetings,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "howdy,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "hello *$" GREPSTR OR lowchat "^hi *$" GREPSTR OR lowchat "greetings *$" GREPSTR OR lowchat "howdy *$" GREPSTR OR lowchat "hola *$" GREPSTR OR isGreet = ; Or Goodbye? lowchat "bye" SUBSTR lowchat "adios" SUBSTR OR lowchat "^later,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "^nite,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "^night,* " GREPSTR OR lowchat "good *nite" GREPSTR OR lowchat "good *night" GREPSTR OR isAdios =

These strings and toggles lay down the shape of all chatterbot code to come. Is the person speaking not me? Are they a guest? Are they addressing me? Is it a greeting? A goodbye? These patterns have been arrived at through trial and (mostly) error. They work for me, usually.
By grabbing at a few basic straws in this way, we can come up with what might be appropriate responses for bot.X....

{ { "Hi there, " whom & SAY } isGreet IF { "CU later, " whom & WHOCHAT PRIVATEMSG } isAdios IF } notMe isG NOT AND IF

This bot is set up to ignore all Guests you may want to do just the opposite, letting the bot greet all guests, but allowing you (the wetware part, remember?) to completely ignore (mute) anything and everything that any guest might say. Like this:

{ { "Hi there, " whom & SAY } isGreet aboutMe AND IF { "CU later, " whom & WHOCHAT PRIVATEMSG } isAdios IF "" CHATSTR = } isG IF

To add personality to the bot, one of the simplest methods is to give it an assortment of roughly equivalent phrases to use, instead of the simple "Hi there, ...." Consider this possible replacement for the greetings line above

[ "Hello |" "Hoy |" "'lo |" "Hello, |" "Hail |" "Howdy |" "@64,64 !It's |!" "Howzit, |?" "Hello" ":Hmm, | returns" "Yo |" "|, my droogie." "Long Time No Viddy, |" "Evening, |" "|" "| wa - do genki?" "Happy happy, |" "|!!" "Greetings, |" ] 19 RANDOM GET greetResp = { "$1" GREPSUB whom & "$2" GREPSUB & greetResp = } greetResp "(.*)|(.*)" GREPSTR IF greetResp SAY

Autonomous palace bots are a process of experimentation like no other. Unlike a "regular" program, you can't control the input! Surprises can come at every corner I once had an auto-greeting bot that started greeting someone else's auto-greeting bot which in turn greeted my bot, which in turn greeted the other bot again.... until one of the bots finally said something that the other didn't recognize, about 30 greetings later.

At this point (!) it's useful to think about our seemingly-innocent changes to the "finger" script. Among other things, it automatically return-fingers the person who fingered it. Now... what if they, too, are running an auto-return "finger"? The two bots will finger each other ad infinitum....
The obvious shortcut solution to this problem is to never let it auto-finger the same user twice in a row, which means keeping track of the WHOCHAT value and stashing it in yet another GLOBAL variable, which is indeed what the BotBot version does.