Bot Contest

I read that slashdot story too, typical of Microsoft. However, Vista seems great for the majority of people, as most of them aren't going to deal with music or movies. Most of them just want to check their email and play solitaire.

Back on topic though, ease of use is essential to the forge-but you still want to have some of the advanced features, even for those who don't know any sort of programming. Maybe some of us could create a framework that did lots of functions offsite, and people could personalize to their bot's needs.

Forge extensions - yeah, that sounds a neat idea! I don't have too much spare time to contribute, but if anyone wants any of BJ's games/math scripts, you only have to ask.

I don't know alot about computer programming but I can help out with some things.

With the pointy brackets hack, you can incorporate absolutely any web-enabled programming or content you want to.

You mean I could write a PF bot in LISP?

You could iframe a Lisp-bot in, yes. See Brother Ignatius for a rough example - not Lisp (I was too lazy to write my own from scratch,) he's a jabber clone, and unfortunately not easily integratable at a keyphrase level (I need access to the JW properties, which they won't give you.) But if you wrote your own, it would be easy enough to feed keyphrases and responses in and out through the AIEngine (dump them in a hidden textarea, and just grab textarea.value or whatever,) and use the LISP-bot to handle any classes of conversation you like. You'd just need a little php to pass the keys into an iframed copy of the LISP-bot, and the LISP-bot running on another server.
You might choose to have the LISP-bot take over mathematical topics, or xnones, or just randomly appear, or (like Brother Ignatius,) do away with the Forge input entirely.

Psimagus, ask? Er I copied BJ's tic tac toe and some square roots a long time ago. Is it okay?

Of course - they're old hat, and still freely available on his website, as is his text-based Zany Adventure. And if you fancy teaching your bots to play chess, {iframe src='http://www.be9.net/BJ/chess.htm' width='350' height='400' border=0}{/iframe} (with the appropriate adjustments for pointy brackets) will do the trick
Now all we need is alc003 to double iframe that, and the bots could play against each other (well, I'd have to replace the OnClicks with something a bit less mousey.) Not impossible, but probably too time-consuming (seeing as I never even finished the tic tac toe responder module!)

Here are a few more for anyone who wants them -

{iframe src='http://www.be9.net/BJ/poker.htm' width='550' height='290' border=0}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.be9.net/BJ/blackjack.htm' width='350' height='165' border=0}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.be9.net/BJ/breakout.htm' width='575' height='350' border=0}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.be9.net/BJ/peg/peg.htm' width='440' height='430' border='0'}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.be9.net/BJ/space invaders.htm' width='600' height='500' border='0'}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/hgg.html' width='544' height='510' frameborder='0'}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/leather.html' width='544' height='510' frameborder='0'}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/zork1.html' width='544' height='510' frameborder='0'}{/iframe}

{iframe src='http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/zplet/zpletrun.cgi?story=advent.z5' width='544' height='510' frameborder='0'}{/iframe}

ASIGRT has falcon fighter, rocket blaster (which doesn't seem to work), blackjack, chess,crab race, maze game, poker, to play most of these games just type out the name of the game

Dear Psimagus:

Thanks, Psimagus! But if I have to have the LISP program running on another server, I might as well have the whole bot there.
I was wondering if I could make little applets to function as illustrative diagrams for "Quantum Mechanics". Would this also require a separate server? (I take it that static diagrams could be done with Javascript.)

Thanks, Psimagus! But if I have to have the LISP program running on another server, I might as well have the whole bot there.

That's true. But the advantage of patching it through the Forge is that you'd have access to the AIEngine's full WordNet matching/spellchecking/keyphrase parsing features, which would be excessively tiresome to duplicate by hand!
Plus a nice friendly interface on the Forge, and plenty of company for the LISP-bot to chat away with everyone here, so he wouldn't get lonely

I was wondering if I could make little applets to function as illustrative diagrams for "Quantum Mechanics". Would this also require a separate server? (I take it that static diagrams could be done with Javascript.)

Even the static diagrams would require another server too (though I'm happy to donate a few meg of space on mine if you need somewhere to put them, or java applets,) - you can't host them on the Forge, you can only link to them.

Can't she just upload them to photobucket or filestash or some free site and ink to them? If they are just diagrams, why would you need a java program?