Unofficial AIM Bot Gives Infocom Classics IM Twist

Fluidic Binary writes "Now instant messenging can waste our time in exciting 'new' ways, according to Wired News, who reveal that an improved unofficial AIM bot has been created to play Infocom games via AOL's messenging client. According to the article: 'The bot, designed by 26-year-old Web programmer Andy Baio, is a Perl script that acts as an intermediary between the games, which are hosted on his server, and AOL's network.'"

Comments

Nothing new. Only improved.

[zaunuz]

This was included in ICQ back in 1999. The only problem was that it didnt work too well, so the lag was horrible, and that was back then playing QuakeWorld with 33.6 modem was acceptable

Nothing new.

[But Who's Counting]

I've seen this done on IRC years ago, actually. It's nicer on IRC than over IM, because you can get a whole channel participating in a group puzzle-solving activity.

Infocom Eh?

[Terminaldogma]

Great, now I can't even message someone without a chance of being eaten by a Grue. -TD

Slashdotted?

[Psychor]

So, is this the first AIM bot we've slashdotted? It's taking forever to let me play Hitchhiker's guide... where's the Google mirror?

Re:Slashdotted?

[Psychor]

Oh, for the curious who can't be bothered to read the link, you want to be connecting to AIM usernames infocombot, infocombot2 or infocombot3. Don't expect a quick response though (ICQ works for this as well as AIM, or your favourite multiple network messaging client).

Too bad rate-limitting kills it

[kriston]

Too bad the built-in rate-limitting in the AIM service kills this. The Smarterchild people had the same problem so they had to get special accounts that weren't rate-limitted.

For those who use these services, rate-limitting is that which prevents you from sending too many instant messages too quickly, and too many instant messages to too many recipients too quickly. The servers penalize you for the more messages you send until you can't carry on a conversation, and then they time out and the rate-limitting wears off. This happens in both the oscar protocols and in the TOC protocols used by things like the Minitik project. The rate limits do not wear off when you sign-off, either.

If you like this kind of thing...

[s88]

take a look at a project I admin and develop on over at sourceforge. Its called jaimbot. Its an AOL IM library and modular AIM bot for plugging in things like this to AIM. We have all sorts of modules (offline and group messenging, stock quotes, games, news, weather, tv info, movie times, ski conditions, etc, as well as an intertaining chatterbot by using MegaHal) and its very simple to add new ones. Follow the link for more details.

Scott

dang

[moof1138]

I used Perl with Net::AIM, Expect, and frotz to make a zork bot a few years back as an amusement. I used it as a simple project before I wrote a bot to do various work related things. It is really handy to be able to check the status of certain things from AIM. The frotz bot was almost all just glue code except for the session handling bit which I added after a while to allow concurrent users - that was more complicated. To think that if I had told someone about it besides my coworkers I might have been featured in Wired...

Re:I like it

[FatalTourist]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe ???

Nerd rage rising... deep breath... don't lose pocket protector...

How about text-to-speech/speech-to-text?

[CityZen]

So I can play the game on the cellphone while I drive? :-)