Infobot is a

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

IRC bot 409px, An IRC bot performing a simple task.An IRC bot is a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to Internet Relay Chat as a client, and so appears to other IRC users as another user. An IRC bot differs from a regular client in ...

, first written in 1995 by

Kevin Lenzo Kevin Lenzo (born 1967) is an American computer scientist. He wrote the initial infobot, founded The Perl Foundation (and was its chairman until 2007) and the Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPC)., released CMU Sphinx into Open source, founded ...

. The bot's main goal was to remember

URLs A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

and associate them with a descriptive name, so whenever someone needed a specific URL they could ask the bot. For that reason, the first Infobot, running in #macintosh on the

EFnet EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network. History Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new se ...

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat ...

network, had the nickname 'url'. Although the main project is now inactive, many

forks In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a Eating utensil, utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with whic ...

from the original program were made, some of which are still active. Most of these forks carry extra features, such as

googling Owing to the dominance of the Google search engine, to ''google'' has become a transitive verb. The neologism commonly refers to searching for information on the World Wide Web, typically using the Google search engine. The American Dialect ...

a phrase given through the chat and saying the results of the query as messages directly in the chat.

Operation

The Infobot works by a method of

factoid A factoid is either a false statement presented as a fact, ''or'' a true but brief or trivial item of news or information. The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fa ...

s. It stores information in its database by connecting a phrase with its definition, usually an informative short line. It records its information by constantly listening to the chat (which is configurable). It states its factoids when it recognizes a question in the chat. For example: wikipedia is https://www.wikipedia.org/ :''The Infobot at this point silently remembers the statement.'' wikipedia? somebody said wikipedia is https://www.wikipedia.org/ Because of its ability to store statements and re-state them with ease, many

IRC channel operator IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat a ...

s use an Infobot to store information such as the channel rules so they could easily give them to newcomers to the channel. Using its automated replies, Infobots are also often used as an entertainment bot, giving humorous replies to certain queries. For example, to prevent the Infobot from saying 'X is Y', the key word '' is used, to have this effect: dumb bot is stupid human infobot: what's up? huh? dumb bot stupid human

Derived bot projects

Infobots running the original Infobot code have become less popular on IRC now, mostly because of the inactivity of the original project. Newer Infobots have additional features. Most of them involve connecting to websites. For example, some bots have a 'weather' module. So someone can ask the Infobot the weather at a certain address, and the Infobot will connect to a weather site and report the up-to-date weather on the chat. Infobots are also useful as calculators, and in currency conversions, word definitions, and many other things which one would otherwise have to open a site for. A notable fork was blootbot by Tim Riker. In 2008 it was merged back with the original infobot. The resulting code is now maintained under the original infobot name by Riker. It uses an

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

back-end such as

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

PGSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transactions with atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability ...

, or

SQLite SQLite ( "S-Q-L-ite", "sequel-ite") is a free and open-source relational database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it ...

to store factoids.

References

* Paul Mutton, ''IRC hacks'',

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

, 2004, , pp. 159–164 *

, ''Infobots and Purl'', chapter 13 in Jon Orwant, ''Games, diversions, and Perl culture: best of the Perl journal'', O'Reilly Media, 2003, , pp. 115–125

Notes

External links

Research in Focus: InfoBots (July 18, 2017)

infobot at SourceForge

article from The Perl Journal {{IRC bots IRC IRC bots Free software programmed in Perl Perl software