ScottBot

A "that's what she said" bot that, much like Data in Generations, keeps trying to better itself.

Requirements

Node. I'm running 0.4.5. I assume anything that supports the libraries will work.
Npm. Then install the dependencies with:

npm install .
Redis. I'm running 2.2.5. Any 2.2.x or higher is probably fine.
A sense of humor and some patience.
IRC mates that won't kill you.

Running

Start scottbot from the command line:

$ node scottbot.js [options]

If you want to see all the options, use the -h option. At a minimum, you'll probably want to specify an IRC server and some channels to join.

scottbot doesn't detach from the terminal or anything fancy like that, and the error handling is probably robust enough to keep anything horrible from happening. But this isn't exactly production-quality code.

If you really want to run it as a daemon, look at forever or supervisord.

Training

The most important part is going to be training. Your scottbot will start very dumb (see TODO) so you need to teach it.

If scottbot made a joke that was funny, or missed a joke, you can say "yes" or "lol" and it will treat the previous statement in the channel as a positive example. For example, if your scottbot is named mscott (the default):

<foo> it was really hard
<foo> mscott: yes
<mscott> ok!

scottbot has just trained "it was really hard" as an example of "funny". The next time someone says "it was really hard" (or something similar, this is Bayesian) you'll probably see:

<foo> it was really hard
<mscott> that's what she said

Again, if you reply with "yes" or "lol", scottbot trains. Conversely, if scottbot makes a terrible joke, you can say "no":

<foo> did you close out bug 1234?
<mscott> that's what she said
<foo> mscott: no
<mscott> sorry :(

Now scottbot has trained "did you close out bug 1234" as a "notfunny" example. You don't have to wait for scottbot to try, you can say "no" and it will train the previous statement as unfunny. (Unfortunately, right now, it still says "sorry.")

<foo> when is the freeze date for 1.2.3?
<foo> mscott: no
<mscott> sorry :(

scottbot trained "when is the freeze date for 1.2.3" as a "notfunny" example.

You can also train scottbot explicity by telling it a funny phase using the following syntax:

<foo> mscott: "foo bar" is funny
<mscott> ok!

Using Bootstrap Data

It can take a while to train scottbot, especially if you don't have time to sit there and teach it. Now there's some training data to get your instance started!

There is a simple script that can load or dump the data from Redis.

The data is in twss.json, and the script to load it is data.js. Run node data.js -h to get all the options, then do one of the following:

# Load data into Redis.
node data.js [options] load

# Dump data to JSON.
node data.js [options] dump

Sharing Training Data

Multiple instances of scottbot can share the same Redis backend, so they can share training data and learn together. The instances I have running on Mozilla IRC and on Freenode share the same DB.

TODO

Train/bootstrap with data from Twitter.
A better way to train correct negatives.
Train when someone else makes a TWSS joke.
Stemming. It stinks that "stick" and "stuck" don't get trained together.
Stopwords. Remember that "it", "he" and "she" are crucial to these jokes.
Don't say "sorry :(" if it didn't just make a joke.
Potentially get really fancy and blend the Bayesian method with other tools, like grammatical analysis to look for pronouns without antecedents. That's definitely not a priority, though, it's going pretty well as-is.

mbrand1/scottbot