Re: Meta-discussion vs. details

[Paul L. A. <pl...@so...>]

Joe McMahon writes: 

> Establishing an agreed-upon framework for implementing bots and/or a 
> protocol for communicating between bots doesn't seem like a bad idea to 
> me.

Having bots able to communicate with each other is a good idea (provided
it can be turned off if desired).  All of the suggested messaging protocols
have some equivalent of an IRC channel (group talk) and private messaging.
It makes sense to layer any inter-bot comms over the private messaging of
whichever messaging medium it's using.  That makes it very, very easy to
implement: if the messaging medium supports private messages then bots can
communicate with each other.  It also avoids having to open yet more ports
in a firewall just so bots can talk to each other when you had to open up
IRC, or Yahoo, or whatever so the bot could work. 

Do we need some pre-agreed command/data/whatever encoding?  It's tempting
to invent one, but you can drive a robot (feed it facts, make it forget
facts, get it to join or leave channels) with private messages.  After
all, its whole reason for existence is to learn from what its told and
to take orders from those permitted to give them.  Or to put it another
way, can anyone conceive of a legitimate type of inter-bot message that
would not also be legitimate (in at least some situations) when given to
the bot by a human (privileged to do so) in public or in private?  So
we don't need a special inter-bot message format. 

What does not make sense is adding RB or SOAP or whatever just so bots
can talk to each other. 

> I remember Andy Lester's talk in which he quoted Nat Torkington: "...it's 
> hard to find capable, intelligent volunteers[;] chas[ing] one away [is] a 
> reprehensible act of destruction." Let's not do that.

I agree entirely with Nat.  However, I am far from convinced that
"intelligent" is applicable to the suggestions that were made.  Adding
RP or SOAP just so bots can talk to each other is a needless complication
and unnecessary bloat.  If you want cross-server communication then give
bots the ability to connect to more than one server.  If you want, for
some bizarre reason, to drive the bot from a desktop app then let it
sit on a local port that you can telnet to and talk to it just as though
you were on IRC private messaging it (except it should never have to
be addressed, even if the configuration for IRC says it must be).  Then
you don't even need a special app, or to learn a different set of commands. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support