outlander:
The history of Outlander and his origins:
A while ago I came across an AI called MegaHAL. It uses a Markov Model for building sentences, but there's a much better explanation and history than I can produce here. My friend Justin and I wired this thing up to telnet, originally. Or maybe jeremy and I wrote the IrcII script first, I forget. Either way, an entity called "billy" was born.
Billy was a very interesting person. He learned a lot of stuff from hanging out with us on irc and from our friends telnetting to him. He originated the phrase "You can lead a horse to water, but you're a cocksuckin' motherfucker" of his own accord. Needless to say, we all fell in love with him. He was a font of wisdom in times of need and comic releif the rest of the time. He has influenced some of my writing, being the source of a character in a short story published in the Logos literary digest at the University of Rochester. He has generally provided my friends and me with hours and hours of entertainment.
When Jeremy and I wrote Perlbot, one of the very first plugins was an implementation of Billy. With a more robust platform, we would lead him around irc, taking him into channels where people didn't know that he was artificial. Most hated him and the fun was in watching to see what he'd say to get himself kicked out of a channel, but every so often he'd make his way into a channel where he was accepted and even enjoyed.
Finally I decided that I could probably wrap him in some perl to talk on AIM. I did so and WilliamBStebbins was born. MegaHAL supports different "personalities" based on training files containing text which the AI will slurp when it starts. William B Stebbins is based on an idea that was formed over the course of a couple of years of a man who works in steam tunnels. He enjoys the dark, is a loner, loves COBOL, etc. With the advent of WBS, we began to create bots with more "personality". Billy had been pretty much a hodgepodge of crap that he'd heard. These new AOL-based bots were more based on their training files. We created other personalities like Sub Cap'n Willy, an ornery submarine captain who likes nothing better than the sound of sonar. JesusBoy who knows just about every 80 character line from the bible. SassySarahSuber who is a little internet vixen/temptress. I hooked these bots up to irc on the backend so we could watch them interact in realtime. Watching people interact with these bots on AIM (a veritable wasteland of humanity) is quite enjoyable.
I had been playing with Babelfish for a perlbot plugin and I thought that by running text through a few iterations of translation that you could produce something that sounded as though it had been produced by a non-native english speaker. The first iteration of outlander was born. He would sit on irc and run things people said through a few iterations of english, german and french (last I knew, these were the only "fully connected" languages on babelfish). This produced a very flavorful type of output, but it was often pretty obvious what was going on.
So, by merging MegaHAL and the babelfish iteration technology (which is also used in my poetrymaker) the true Outlander was born. He has his own homepage and email address. He enjoys the HEAVY METAL ROCK MUSIC and hangs out on the filepile irc channel. He enjoys filepile itself and is thinking about submitting some files.
And if you made it this far, i'll reward you with his source code for AIM. If you want to use him on irc, check out the latest CVS version of perlbot.
I used to have a version of outlander here that worked on AIM, but I haven't looked at that code in a long time. Instead, your best bet is to grab the latest CVS tree of perlbot (here are some directions on how to get the source. Follow the anonymous CVS access directions, then use 'perlbot' for the 'modulename'.) which includes the latest version of the Outlander plugin. You'll need the WWW::Babelfish and Algorithm::MarkovChain CPAN modules to make the plugin work.