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.'"

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

Re:Nothing new. Only improved.

[pinkUZI]

...ah, I remember the days - when all my friends had ONE instant messenger, nobody had ever heard of IM spam. Then, alas, AOL bought out ICQ and it all went downhill from there.

It is funny sometimes to think back to the message posted on ICQ's website (remember mirabilis.com or something like that) when AOL bought them. Something to the effect of, "we are confident AOL will be a good steward of ICQ..." {sigh}

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

I like it

[Professor Cool Linux]

i play it all the time (cept now cause /. thx guys)
its fun especially "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe". Love it, much fun.

Re:I like it

[FatalTourist]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe ???

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

Re:I like it

[satterth]

And FatalTourist looses it.

He head fakes Professor Cool Linux with a picture of Natalie Portman and the idiot falls for it.

After a fury to the solarplexes FatalTourist says: "Is that enough Guide to the Universe for you?"

Re:I like it

[Khith]

Haven't you heard? It's the new updated edition!

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).

Why is this news?

[fm6]

IM bots are nothing new. Nor are online Infocom games [elsewhere.org]. So you put the two of them together, and it's something special?

What would impress me is if somebody got the original version online where we could play it. No I don't mean the Infocom games. I mean the original MIT game that only ever ran on a PDP-10 [wikipedia.org].

Original version?

[Anonymous Coward]

West of House Score: 0 / 2

Welcome to Dungeon. This version created 1-Oct-94.

This is an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
A rubber mat saying "Welcome to Dungeon!" lies by the door.

>open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.

>read leaflet
Taken.
Welcome to Dungeon!

Dungeon is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will
explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by morta

Re:Original version?

[oskillator]

> LOOK UNDER MAT

Re:Why is this news?

[oskillator]

The original has been ported from MDL to C, so it's actually all over the place.

Lemme see if iFiction has a playable version... yep! Here it is. [ifiction.org]

The trilogy is better, though. Less coherent because they had to split it up, but there's more content, the puzzles are friendlier, and the connections between rooms are more sensible.

Re:Why is this news?

[fm6]

Is this the full version? I remember playing an incomplete port on PDP-11s before the commercial games appeared. It was initially unauthorized (though the author did get permission after the fact) and based on a pre-final version of the MDL game. I also seem to recall that the author took some small shortcuts with the parser and the game logic.

Re:Not original, not fair

[freakmn]

This is an AOL Instant Messanger bot, not a program that helps you to aim in first person shooters, I agree that the title might be confusing.

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 [sf.net]. The rate limits do not wear off when you sign-off, either.

shut down?

[mandalayx]

Infocombot and InfocomBot2 are offline, it seems.

Re:shut down?

[rmohr02]

When you appear on too many buddy lists, AOL makes you appear offline to everyone. However, they can still send you messages if they want.

eh

[OwlofCreamCheese]

did they program anything? as far as I know thats just two premade moduals glued together, you don't even need to know perl to do that. and the sendlimit makes sure that its not something the public can use.

Re:eh

[gnudutch]

And as we all know, open source moduals always glue together nicely without any fiddling around. What a bunch of slackers, huh?

Re:eh

[coldguy]

Modules, dammit.

aimbot?

[Mathness]

I read that as aimbot, and I was thinking "Infocom released a FPS game? Damn, I do not have that :("

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 [sourceforge.net]. 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...

QW to IRC

[Anonymous Coward]

Witness my mighty Quakeworld/IRC gateway. /Kill people with grenades.

(I'm a very sad man)

How dare you...

[Inf0phreak]

How dare you post a story about an aim bot? There are enough cheaters on the servers of all FPS's out there already! ^_^

GrokItBot

[duncangough]

I'm biased, but everytime I see IM bots like this I cringe at the interface.

I plugged a bayesian guesser into a trimmed down ALICE bot and the interface is much more tolerant of speeling mistokes and the way different people phrase questions and answers.

GrokItBot [suttree.com] is a bare bones version of this. If you're interested I'd strongly encourage you to download the code :)

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

[CityZen]

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