sadface

an IRC Markov Chain chatbot

Intro

Markov bots make for amusing text generators. They don’t make much sense, usually. When they do make sense, it’s pure chance.

sadface draws its vocabulary and concepts from a flat text file, where each line is considered a sentence. The bot chains words together to create sentences, which it passes to the IRC channel it is in.

Right now, sadface only supports one channel, but you can have multiple instances of sadface running with different configuration files. The configuration file is specified at runtime as an argument: python sadface.py config-file.ini

Included in this repo are sadface.py and default.ini. If you want to change default.ini, I encourage you to copy default.ini and change the variables, so you can have an untouched default.ini.

You can start sadface with a blank brain_file.txt, but its replies won’t make much sense at all until it’s heard a lot of conversation. I recommend putting several books into the file. Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top) is a good place to start. Separate sentences by newlines. Replies look best if there are no quotes or tabs in brain_file.txt. You can specify different brain files with your config.ini.

Included files

sadface.py

Usage: python sadface.py /path/to/config.ini

sadface also requires brain_file.txt, which is a flat txt file of newline- separated sentences. brain_file.txt is specified in config.ini

default.ini

The example configuration

sed_cleaning.sh

Usage: sed_cleaning.sh old_brain.txt temporaryfile clean_brain.txt

A sed script that cleans up brain_file.txt by writing it to a new brain_file. Add whatever you need to to clean up the files you feed sadface.

Prerequisites

• brain_file.txt: A flat text file of newline-separated sentences. sadface draws from brain_file.txt to create its replies, and adds things said in-channel to the brain file. This can have a different name, set in the .ini file

• Python 2.7.3

• python-twisted

Credits

• Eric Florenzano

  • sadface derives heavily from his MomBot Markov bot code
  • http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2008/11/16/writing-markov-chain-irc-bot-twisted-and-python/
  • http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130106092748/http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2008/11/16/writing-markov-chain-irc-bot-twisted-and-python/

• hhokanson

  • sadface's configuration methods derive from her AnonBot IRC anonymizer bot
  • https://bitbucket.org/hhokanson/anonbot/src