Frankenstein revisited Meeting
Friday 4 & Saturday 5th March 2016
Catherine, Anja, James, An, Piero

For all public pads on Constant: http://etherdump.constantvzw.org

* Change in dates (tbc)
- 13/14th May -> 26/27-5 from 11 till 18 or 19h ; anne : i'm not sure i can make it (school duties) : i can on 13th-14th
- 10/11th June --> 18/19th June 11 till 18 or 19h (that weekend i can't be in brussels) -> let's discuss this again next time we're together - i stop teaching from 4th of june (and while i still have school duties, it's not as fixed as before, though i need to check with colleagues - will know more soon - before or after the 11th would be good. until 16th is fine. and then after 27th -> 14/15th June?

IRC Channel
- Pidgin, colloquy, konversation, xchat, etc
we're on irc.freenode.net #algolit

* Ideas
make page with a list of bots

USERLINKED
- bot that changes its ID: 
- being kicked out // kill people as consequence: James is reading IRC-specs to find 'not too unpleasant' way to kill people, monster always murders without witness
- weather/climate bot: change its mood following rela life weather data // change colour depending on style (Franco Moretti)
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sopel
Piero made a bot (it responds to the string "how are" written in the channel with some "mood" based on the temperature of a given location: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/weather_IRC_bot
https://sopel.chat
https://code.google.com/archive/p/python-weather-api/
- private messages with statements from the novel


TEXTLINKED
Some of these questions can be used for the introduction & connect it to some bots

- online materials of the places that are mentioned in the novel cfr Librarian bot (Relearn)
- 3 (not 4, as the cottager doesn't really speak in first person) 'I' perspectives in the novel, play with that? - a bot that speaks with three first person perspectives - russian doll narrative structure
- emotion analysis (people weep a lot in a novel)
- expand the novel with scientific knowledge on how to make a monster (it only takes 1 page), relate to existing technologies (nanotechnolgy)
- what if he would have found other material, ex Tay's nazist tweet inputs
- it doesn't require Victor anymore to create its soulmate, he could create using the same algorithm 
- how does an IRC-monster look like? its sight frightens people, cfr Tay is a virtual monster, Eliza
-> F monster wasn't necessarily bad, saves kid, but frightens so much that he's shot
-> focus on AI information
- modern Prometheus: what is the gift here?
- link to luddism UK at that time? a bot that has limited lives: the user fights the bot to kill it 
- it disappears many times -> where does it go? or why? a bot that narrates why it leaves, it answers questions from the participants on why it had to leave
- propose bot with story of Frankenstein we like
- speaking about F with Open source material (public domain http://publicdomainreview.org/)




- notion of friendship (social network analysis)

- rewrite/remix code to remix text
- language construction, learning vocabularies: copy word, reverse word, replace word by definition, replace word by synonyms, learn frequency, going in dialogue using patterns (Eliza), answering using POS, librarian (finding links & references on the web based on given words), add opinion/sentiment analysis, speaking fluent/creating new words using neural networks
-> follow Oulipo recipes?


DEVELOPED BOTS
## Script for learning definitions of nouns from textfile:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/learning_definitions.py
## Bot learning definitions from IRC message:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/bot_learning_definitions.py
* synonyms, definitions: Wordnet http://www.nltk.org/howto/wordnet.html
https://pythonprogramming.net/wordnet-nltk-tutorial/
* Pattern for Python (Python2.7)  http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pattern

## Monkbot/Typewriter/Logbook
http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/monkbot.py
-> better use logfile of client (limechat, pidgin...)
For Pidgin: it stores its settings and logs in ~/.purple in html-format :-(
    might be good to look for other FLOSS client

## Multi-threaded murder bot
http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/murder_bot.py

## Weather bot
it responds to the string "how are" written in the channel with some "mood" based on the temperature of a given location: http://pad.constantvzw.org/public_pad/weather_IRC_bot
https://sopel.chat
https://code.google.com/archive/p/python-weather-api/

* Some litterature on bots
-'Chatbot le Robot', Drame philosophique en quatre questions et cinq actes, Pascal Chabot, Presse Universitaire de France, 2016 (only in french !)
-Twitter bot encyclopedia, Elizaveta Pritychenko, 2014
-Dadabot, Nicolas Nova, IDpure, 2016 -> itw in english : Nicolas Nova sees dada in Biga Data : http://www.makery.info/en/2016/01/19/nicolas-nova-voit-du-dada-dans-la-data/
Founder of the Near Future Laboratory, Nicolas Nova is a futurologist, specialized in the history of design, ethnographer of our digital practices, teacher at Head (Geneva)
-webdoc dada-data (100 anniversary of Dada - Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich) : http://dada-data.net/fr/
-  Marie Lechner: will be invited in Suiss as well, she gave a 5h seminar on her research on chatbots (link is only 2,5hs): http://www.mediamediums.net/en/seminar
- Bot who passed Turing Test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman
- TED talks: https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our_computers_get_smarter_than_we_are#t-825413

* Experimental publishing
http://greyscalepress.com/
A project by the founder (Manuel Schmalstieg) using chat rooms and IRC: 
http://n3krozoft.com/2004/laughing-out-loud/
http://ms-studio.net/audiovisual/lol-laughing-out-loud/

* Some commandline exercises
Recommendations from the CLIPS team (UAntwerpen)