This is where legacy old chatbots, which may or may not (probably not) work anymore, go to die.

This is a collection of old archived chatbot projects from circa 2003 from the old AiChaos website.

For the most part each bot is left intact from its final release version, with maybe some log files or such cleaned up.

All of these bots were released under the GNU General Public License version 2.

In as close to chronological order as I can remember, here's information about the old legacy AiChaos chatbot platforms.

This was a learning chatbot which learns how to chat by chatting with people. The mechanism is pretty simple and works like this:

1. Bot's brain is empty; its first user says "hello"
2. Bot doesn't know an answer for that, and repeats the user instead.
3. User now says "how are you?"
4. Bot doesn't know the answer to that, either, but it logs internally that "how are you?" is a valid follow-up question for "hello". For now it just repeats the user's message, again.
5. A second user says "hello" to the bot. The bot knows that "how are you?" is a valid follow-up question to "hello", and it says "how are you?" to the second user.

This system worked okay with only a single user using the bot, but it falls apart quickly when unleashed on the general Internet.

• Date: 2002-04
• Final version: 1.0.00
• Supported chat platforms:
  • AOL Instant Messenger
  • MSN Messenger
• Supported brains:
  • Custom learning brain

Nexus was a learning chatbot similar to Chaosbot. I don't remember what the difference in algorithm is, if any.

It had several levels of user access control: moderator, supermoderator, admin, superadmin, and master. It had a pluggable command system, but commands weren't auto-discoverable like they are in the Juggernaut and Leviathan bots.

• Date: 2002-04
• Final version: 1.0.00
• Supported chat platforms:
  • AOL Instant Messenger
  • MSN Messenger
  • HTTP daemon
• Supported brains:
  • Nexus: custom learning brain like Chaosbot

Juggernaut was a monolithic chatbot that connects to multiple chat platforms, supports multiple brain back-ends, and has a pluggable commands system with automatic discovery (commands are self-documenting and registered automatically).

It comes with dozens of commands, including random games, a primitive currency system, lots of random reply generators, weather lookup, etc.

It supports multiple layers of user authentication: moderators, administrators, and botmasters (super-admins).

It also includes a graphical front-end written in Perl/Tk.

• Date: 2004
• Final version: 4.0
• Supported chat platforms:
  • AOL Instant Messenger
  • MSN Messenger
  • IRC
  • HTTP daemon
• Supported brains:
  • ChaosML (custom reply language; AIML-like; ancestor to RiveScript)
  • Juggernaut (seems to be similar to ChaosML)
  • Nexus (an evolved version of the NexusBot brain)
  • ELIZA (via Chatbot::Eliza)

Leviathan was the successor to Juggernaut and contains most of the same features. It was a rewrite from the ground up using lessons learned from developing Juggernaut, and it supports even more brain back-ends including an experimental successor to the NexusBot brain named Rive (not to be confused with RiveScript).

An older release of Leviathan included a Perl/Tk GUI, but version 2.0 does not.

• Date: April 20, 2006
• Final version: 2.0
• Supported chat platforms:
  • AOL Instant Messenger
  • MSN Messenger
  • IRC
  • CyanChat
  • XMPP
  • SMTP daemon (needs to listen on port 25)
  • HTTP daemon
• Supported brains:
  • Chatbot::Alpha - the direct predecessor to RiveScript.
    • Personalities: Alice, Standard, Casey, Cody, Chaos
  • ChaosML
  • ELIZA (via Chatbot::Eliza)
  • Guardians (a utilitarian "brain"... it was used purely for monitor bots that would add other bots (or users) to their buddy list and monitor online status/uptime).
  • Juggernaut
  • Nexus
  • Rive (a successor to Nexus which tagged learned information with the user ID, to make moderation and cleanup easier; not to be confused with RiveScript).

Aiden was the successor to Leviathan and was mostly for my own use. It doesn't include a lot of the documentation, bundled dependencies, easy configuration formats, or general user-friendliness of previous AiChaos bots.

It doesn't include much user-access control except for a Botmaster role, with a small set of related commands that can be used. The botmaster commands were implemented via a standard RiveScript Perl object macro.

• Final version: 1.0
• Supported chat platforms:
  • AOL Instant Messenger
  • MSN Messenger
  • Yahoo! Messenger
  • HTTP daemon
• Supported brains:
  • RiveScript