Fun with Markov Chains
6 hours ago
- #Markov Chains
- #Chatterbots
- #IRC History
- The author has a long-standing fascination with chatterbots, tracing back to an 11-year-old encounter with Eliza at the Lawrence Hall of Science in 1979.
- In 1997, while learning Python (primarily used for IRC bots at the time), they created an IRC bot named Vlad, using a C program called MegaHal that employs Markov chains to generate text by analyzing and recombining input data, similar to modern LLMs but simpler.
- Vlad was trained on conversations from the #gothic IRC channel over two years, resulting in output that mixed in-jokes, profanity, and sometimes lucid-sounding phrases, leading to users interacting more with the bot than each other, which eventually prompted its shutdown.
- The author reflects on lessons learned, such as keeping bots business-focused to avoid chatter, and is now revisiting these ideas while building a voice-interactive system with OpenVoice OS.
- A collection of Vlad's most notable and often profane responses from IRC logs is shared, highlighting its unpredictable and humorous nature, described as '50,000X better than ChatGPT' in the author's opinion.