Slashdot Mirror

No I would not.
Passing the turing test does a program not even make an AI (IMHO). It is just a program, passed the test and: is completely useless, it can't do anything else!
There are plenty of AI systems that are much smarter (in their professional area) but they don't pretent to be humans, nor do they compete wih other 'AI's that pretent to be human.
Hint: AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Tricking a human into believing he is chatting with another human does not make the program intelligent. It only shows the programmers where clever.
And, yes, I once wrote an IRC bot with this very very good framework/library: http://www.jibble.org/pircbot....
The bot is called Pirx (a character from a Stanislav Lem novel series). Actually besides being a typical IRC bot, it was an 'Eliza' program.
As long as it did not recognize a command, but was aware a user interacted with it (basically every sentence started with: 'Pirx, ' strated either a command or an interaction) it started to get you into an conversation.
The idiots in the IRC channel where 100% sure that *I* was answering on behalf of Pirx. And that was only a simple Eliza, but granted it talked to dozens of people at the same time.

RoboCode
Make it a competition amongst the members of the club. This is a little more modern take on old clubs where the main focus was usually Chess, Checkers, etc.

For a little more advanced stuff, you could fork Mana World or create bots for the server and improve the game overall.

Make an IRC MUD using PircBot or any of the other libraries out there. I've always wanted to do this but have never gotten around to it.

Lastly, the most advanced option... research into making another Linux Distro ("Club Name" Distro -- also come up with a cool club name) or another Linux Desktop Environment (forking LXDE will be the easiest).

There are lots of little things like this that you can research on the web. Chess can still be fun if you require no use of search trees, but instead force the use of a more pseudo-random algorithm like the Genetic Algorithm. Ask around the school to see what people are doing in their spare time at home and what they think is fun. Most people using Facebook? Maybe write a really simple Facebook app and then eventually a game...

http://www.jibble.org/cookies.php

I used to use a simple program to monitor a couple IRC chatrooms; it created a timelapse map of interactions between members. It was fascinating to see the map literally breathe, but it also served a more important purpose in studying the interactions of those members with a 'bot script I created to run alongside. The results surprised me.

I went in expecting just one or two of the nerdier members interacting with the bot (the regulars knew it was a bot, the transients didn't) to "teach" it new responses to key words and phrases. What I found was pretty much everyone in the chatrooms interacting with the bot to the point of saturation. In fact I had to upgrade the hardware just so it could keep up.

I didn't have to look at the chat logs to see this behaviour, it was all on the maps and the ever increasing 'bot database.

FWIW, the mapping software was called PieSpy. I have since, unfortunately, lost the 'bot database and am not in a mind currently to recreate it.

I can think of very few useful features that Second Life has and IRC lacks. The primary one would be images and videos. (They have hyperlinks for those on IRC.) I'm sure a 3D model or two could be made, but the Second Life construction system is not particularly conducive to detailed technical modeling, and they would only really be useful for publicity.

Clearly you have not seen Paul Mutton's 'Shakespeare Social Networks' application (based off his PieSpy IRC bot...

IRC social network monitoring and visualization software here. Taken from the summary of this previous Slashdot story. Thought you might be interested.

Sure, there are plenty of them.

Here's the first google hit for "irc bot ai", there are plenty more.

I don't think they're useful, but they can be entertaining when some leghumping 15 year old kid gets into a fight with, or hits on one.

There are scads of folks out there busily building their own add-ons and plugins for the BartPE environment which you can just download and include in your own installation- everything from Java Runtime to Citrix ICA client to Trillian. And literally a hundred more.

I've found it an indispensible Windows recovery tool. I can boot off the CD and run Adaware, Spybot and McAfee scans on the system hard drive, removing all the IE trojan nonsense before it starts up and get resident in memory. I can connect to network shares and transfer data from machines that won't boot.

You don't even have to boot from the CD- it will autorun in an active Windows XP session and give you the same NU2 menu. So it can be used to run applications locally that you don't want to install on the client's machine.

ahhh, I got it while on dial-up :), looks like it hit a bit of turbulence..

A link to some collected quotes

So what the heck has this to do with Shakespeare?

I use a social networking bot in Java, thank you. :)

Write your own?