Cemetech Contest #16: Chatty Cyborgs
Published by jonbush 8 years ago (2016-03-03T02:22:00+00:00) | Discuss this article

In January, we concluded Cemetech Contest #15: Crypto Golfing. This contest required participants to determine how a secret message was encoded, and to create a program to perform the decoding. This contest takes that a little farther and provides many more categories to earn points in. Cemetech Contest #16, created by KingInfinity and jonbush, is about IRC bots. To win this contest, you will need to create and test an IRC bot with features listed below. Each feature you implement is worth some points. The type of IRC bot you will be making is an AI Bot, or a chatbot. This type of bot can have conversations with users in the IRC chat just like a real human can. You can program in any language, using frameworks only to build your bot structure, and as much space as requires. Make sure you maintain a detailed thread with your progress. At the end of the contest, you will need your source and documentation on which features you would like the judges to observe. We will test the bots on the IRC channel #contest-16 on 5/1/2016. Good luck, and have fun!

PRIZES
The top two overall winners will win a prize, with the first place winner getting first choice.

RULES
  • Contestants may not release any code or binaries before the end of the contest, including asking for programming help publicly or privately. Violators will be disqualified. Projects that have already been released in any form (excluding a contest project topic) already are not eligible for the contest.
  • The contest will run until 4/30/2016, at 11:59:59pm Eastern Time. No late entries will be accepted.
  • All contestants must maintain a topic in the Contests subforum on Cemetech, including a first post that mentions the programming language(s) you'll be using. Do not post algorithmic solutions, code, or hints.
  • Submit entries by emailing them, in a zip file, to contest at this domain name. The file name should be formatted as follows: username_bot.zip. Be sure to provide your Cemetech username in the subject or body of the email so we know who you are! Each Cemetech member can submit a single entry in one or more of the accepted language + platform combinations.
  • Judging will be performed by a team picked from among the Cemetech administrators and members; all judges are disqualified from entering the contest. Results will be posted no later than ten days after the end of the contest.
  • The bot must be able to connect to IRC and maintain a connection. Entries with an inability to do this will be disqualified.
  • You may only use frameworks or libraries for your bot's structure (i.e. PircBot), you may not use a downloaded library to get information from a source, you must do this yourself (i.e. you may use Wikipedia, but you can't use a library made by someone else that gets Wikipedia articles for you)
  • Additional rules are listed here.


JUDGING
We will be judging results based on requirements met in individual categories of the features listed here, points are all or nothing for each requirement. There will be winners in each category, as well as an overall winner based on total points across all categories. Since we are aware that some participants will create new features not listed, we do plan to award a total amount of 4*[number of participants] wildcard points to any other features that are not listed. Since we are only awarding a limited amount of total extra points, make any original features you create extra competitively savvy!

CRITERIA
The chatbots will be scored based on the criteria listed in the Features for ChatBot spreadsheet.



What are you waiting for? Get creating! We're so excited to see what you can do!

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