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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

The new wave of chatbots gives me a fuzzy feeling, because I began programming ~2000 by writing chat-bots for IRC in mIRC script.

They didn't have NLP, but some easy commands and they didn't need to scale much, because I always had below 1000 users at the same time. News bots, filesharing bots, social network/user stat bots, game bots, etc.

Funny that I accomplished to write a news bot that got its data from some news site via sockets by copy-paste and edit some code I found online. I didn't even know what arrays were, let alone half ot the code I copied. But somehow I got the target host changed and the needed data parsed out of the HTML.

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Ditto, that was my entry to 'programming' - to begin with it consisted of copying a bunch Runescape stats scripts from Hawkee and running on my desktop. As it progressed I included some persistence for some feature, implemented by creating a bunch of global variables with the user's nick as the first part of it. I think I felt that storing to file was overcomplicating things, bearing in mind that I was pretty young at the time.

I do recall coming across some scaling issues, which I resolved by spinning up another instance of mIRC and running it with the name <botname>2. That seemed to work pretty well. 'v2' came next, wholly consisting of changing all of the scripts' colours to be homogeneous.

Ah good old mIRC bots. Same here man. Except mine were mIRC "mud" games.

Very quickly i wrote a very large game from scratch teaching myself all sorts of concepts. It wasn't impressive at all, but oddly i'm quite impressed that i was able to "learn as you go" a semi-advanced project with such a simple language.

I'm not likely to ever be considered a virtuoso or anything, quite ordinary infact, which then means that mIRC's scripting language and documentation must have been very friendly for a complete beginner to program a virtual environment with state, rooms, "ai" traveling between rooms, and etc. It was far more than a hello world, and all thanks to mIRC it seems.

Ah, the good ol' days.

I wrote my first chatbot for IRC, and then later on for AIM. Such great memories!

The first chapter of my book, "Building Voice-Enabled Apps with Alexa" covers several of these topics, including XDCC chatbots, Eliza, The Loebner Prize, and a lot more of chatbot history. Fun stuff!

"Building Voice-Enabled Apps with Alexa"

https://library.oreilly.com/book/9781939902443/building-voic...

There is lots of deja vu for me. I spent my days in 97-00 hosting Eggdrops on IRC (mainly IRCNet but some others as well).

Spent my days deep in TCL, accidentally discovering probably the single deadliest bug in Eggdrop with an accidental copy and paste (would cause all bots in the botnet to go into an infinite loop)

For the last two years I've been working on similar problems but for Messaging networks (Messenger, SMS, Intercom, Slack etc) in $currentstartup

If anyone has questions around bots, conversation management, integrations, NLP etc etc, feel free to ask.

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