This past weekend, I have been experimenting with creating a chat "bot." For those of you who don't know, a chat bot is a program that logs onto a chat client, like AIM or ICQ, randomly finds someone online and pretends to be a human being. Because I am such a computer dork and creating such things is something that I would consider "fun," I have been doing some research into what kinds of chat bots have already been created. I found a site that had a bot that could connect to ICQ. So, I downloaded a copy. The results of running this bot are pretty funny. Here are my favorite three (thus far):

(Some of these contain foul language, so consider yourself warned.)

• A conversation "Fred" had with Wild Child (My personal favorite.)
  
• A flame war that my buddy "Fred" got into.
  
• Someone "pulling teeth" trying to get "Fred" to answer the most basic questions.
  

In case anyone is interested, I downloaded "Fred" from www.icqbot.net. The only problem so far is that it occassionally starts sending blank messages and needs to be restarted.

At some point, I think I am going to customize the responses a little bit. Maybe I will create Tiberius, a Star Trek geek. :-D