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Comment by snerbles | Hacker News Reader

When I first learned about Markov chains in the early '00s, I found and hacked at a simple IRC bot, and deployed it to a number of rooms found in the mIRC defaults. It would sit in each channel and learn, only replying when DM'd.

I did give the bot a few hard-coded replies, namely to "ASL?" with "[random integer 20-30]/f/cali" and "pic?" with a random link to images from Google Image search. Otherwise it would happily barf up random Markov walks from all of the other conversations without any consideration of context.

In the span of one weekend at least five hundred unique users attempted to chat with it, some for hours on end. I only have a few logs left, but the conversations generally progressed from horny to irate or bizarre.

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I did something remarkably similar. In the 90s I independently reinvented Markov chains, although I didn't know that was what it was called. I wrote a mIRC plugin and made a bot with it. I gave it the username "Cybergirl" for both the pun factor and that it encouraged people to message it.

I remember one conversation in particular that, by chance, went so well that it had some poor soul convinced it/she lived in his city and was going to come over.

I also saw a TV episode where a magician demonstrated supposed ability to play simultaneous (round-robin) chess games against multiple grand masters. The conceit behind the trick was that (after the first board) the magician was just mirroring the last move made so that the grand masters were effectively playing each other but didn't know it. That gave me the idea to modify the bot to connect two people through the bot.

Have the bot tell both users that it's randint(18,25)/f/cali, then connect both users together and get some popcorn ready.

>modify the bot to connect two people through the bot.

When I think about that, isn't that exactly equivalent to having the 2 people chat with themselves?

Yes. They made that point explicitly themselves

Exactly my thought. Is the bot learning from that exchange or what part does it play? Otherwise it's just 2 people chatting with each other.

I vaguely recall reading a story (probably 15-20-ish years ago) about someone doing exactly that with ICQ (or a similar service - memory is a bit hazy on the details!).

Create a fake profile of an attractive young lady who is interested in chatting to strangers, wait for inbound calls, pair them up with each other & record the resulting audio.

IIRC - the funniest one was a pairing where one participant wasn't phased by the situation they found themselves in, and still wanted the other participant to talk dirty to them...

Sure, any bot running on IRC (e.g. Eliza or A.L.I.C.E.) could run via Bitlbee (IRC to IM gateway originally a fork of Gaim/Pidgin) on other networks such as ICQ. There was also e.g. Licq which could spoof UIN and message, as well as that it had plugins for bots. I also had a friend who ran a sexbot called jenny on DALnet (not the IRC network with the most clever population). Fun times!

Perhaps you're thinking of Mark V Shaney's posts on the usenet group alt.singles

It was written by Rob Pike and Bruce Ellis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

For anyone interested in the Chess story, it's a trick performed by Darren Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAXIubSTkc

I really liked the simplicity of the trick (concept wise). Though I sure as hell couldn't memorise all those moves.

I remember seeing that in a riddle book about 20 years ago.

That’s about the same age as this show

I had a IRC-Channel that was plagued with stackoverflow type questions regarding the api of some open source project. So i trained a neural convo model https://github.com/macournoyer/neuralconvo on the irc-chatlogs of the past years to supply common answers.

Was a absolute disaster. Bot did troll at first, then after i spend lots of time filtering data, it would just drop "conversation ending links" it had no clue about what was behind. Aka LetMeGoogleThatForYou into the documentation.

Project aborted after that, also because citizens of the channel became annoyed about the replies after each questionmark.

I did the same thing with an alice bot on IRC. It also joined channels and only responded to private messages. It was remarkable how long some people persisted in talking to it when they thought it was a potential mating partner.

> It was remarkable how long some people persisted in talking to it when they thought it was a potential mating partner.

We as a species are going to be so vulnerable when latest-generation AI chatbots break out into general availability.

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