A note on external Bots

 

External bots a are mot difficult to do, but have various advantages. There are 3 different kinds of external bots:

1. Bots that hoock up to a user name via a telnet connection. This can be programmed quite rapidly, however then you must parse everything that happens on the screen. Sometimes when talking to Daniel at TecfaMOO you talk in fact to a LISP program that connects via Telnet to his character. It's a simple hack based on the Eliza Example in Norvig's AI Programming Book
2. Bots that hook up to the MOO via the FUP interface or some modified server. You need access to the server machine to do this (have not tried this at TECFAMOO).
3. Bots that communicate with the MOO via a special port using a special MOO to client protocol, i.e. the technique that is used for building http servers for example (have not tried this at TECFAMOO).

Pointers:

• Look at the The Julia Program Julia was a program that connected to a character in a TinyMUD.

The major advantage of external bots is being able to use typical AI languages to build those things and the fact that (in principle) they would work on different MOOs without the need to port code.