botwars @ IRC PWMN

Recently a scramble bot appeared to the #room channel, and everyone was thrilled with it. Epic wars took place in order to make the best score @ the (un)scramble game.

One day a user appeared with huge capabilities and an even greater vocabulary build. We suspected at once that the user was using a bot and we decided to create a counter-bot that could defeat that user. The intention of the team[1] was not to create a second irc bot that would trick the irc channel’s users into thinking that the user was playing legitimately but instead to prove that the BOTs existed and everyone with more or less technical/programming skills could beat every kind of competition using some intuitive thinking.

The above philosophical ideas formed into a solid and working bot called specialK a bot that operates at #room of HWN network (joining information in greek can be found here).

On the build of the bot there aren’t much to write about; some techniques that lead to O(1) searches on the lexicon used and some other preprocessing techniques that make that search time possible[2]. The irc framework was based on the pirc bot framework and the lexikon in use is the cracklib-small provided by gentoo.

[1] For this project I worked with mr bug is found in RandomAccessFile Undertaker. Synergy produces great results :-)

[2] More technical details (including the produced source code under GPL3 and maybe an executable) will be posted when the final botwar take place, and a winner is established at the botwar competition.

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