7 Aug 2001 (updated 10 Aug 2001 at 14:05 UTC)
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Well I've been working recently on a Perl irc bot, smeg.
It's an interesting way to pass time. We're in the process
of moving a lot of persistent data to a SQL backend. Eimi has been
investigating PostgreSQL and MySQL. Smeg is getting
pretty advanced. He speaks on topic, utilizing a rather
large database of quotations (originally based on the
fortune packages). He also gets information from the web
and of
course has some preprogrammed responses. He has a mood and
and affiliation to individual users based on their karma.
He keeps a hierarchy of objects and how they relate to each
other which provides him with a basic understanding of the
universe. He can tell your fortune, give you news headlines
(/., LinuxToday, and lwn.net daily).
We'd really like to do more to separate the "engine" (such
as it is) from the implementation. The ultimate goal is to
make him seem more human-like, while providing some cool
bot-like functions which can be hidden. To that end he will
spontaneously do things such as mark himself away for
various reasons (depending on his mood, which isn't
arbitrary--it's based on how users treat him), speak
spontaneously, etc. Admins of Smeg have remote control over
him. He plays cards (52 games to be precise), keeps a
calendar and watch which can affect things he does which are
time or date specific and admin-definable. He will give
definitions of words, perform web-queries, and serve a damn
fine beer (if he likes you). I shit you not.