History of ainebot and the Aine Language The ainebot 'chatbot' is descended from a long line of 'chatbot' programs designed to use input files written in AIML. AIML stands for Artifical Intelligence Markup Language. The Aine Language is based on AIML. The AIML language was originally designed by Dr. Richard Wallace and the first AIML interpreter was written in the 'setl' language. It later came to be know as 'Program M'. Dr. Wallace also wrote the original CGI version of C-Alice and wrote the 'classify' C program. He also created and refined the original A.L.I.C.E. 'personality'. Jacco Bikker wrote the original C(++??) code for C-Alice which was the basis for the following versions. Much of the code still found in the ainebot interpreters was originally by him. Jacco later started his own project called WinAlice which provides an alice-based interface for the Windows OS. Gary Dubuque developed Program N (also called AIMLpad), based on Jacco's AliCE (Alice on WinCE) implementation. Philippe Raxhon wrote the program wxAlice, an AIML interface which used the wxWindows GUI library. Ainebot includes the sources for 'wxAine' which is based on wxAlice. Terry Welch wrote an eggdrop script for use with C-Alice. It has been adapted for ainebot and is included with the sources. Chicoine Rejean modified the eggdrop script so that it worked with private messages and when the bots name is called. Stephen Logan provided a perl script for using C-Alice on IRC. Jedi Striker provided a TCP/IP version of Alice. Many others contributed to the C-Alice project and/or the JAVA version of alice which influenced the C-Alice project. They include: Kirk Munoz, Diana Andreacchio, Sergey Bogdanov and Conan Callen. Many others from the C-Alice mailing list and from equality.ipa.net provided testing and bug-fixes which improved the C-Alice code. Anthony Taylor ported C-Alice to Unix and later developed the 'Hippie' chatbot based on the original C-Alice sources. He developed 'Hippie' up to version 0.2.7. Philippe Raxhon provided many bug fixes, and code suggestions, and also came up with the idea and implementation of init files for C-Alice. His code was also implemented in Hippie. David Calinski developed Hippie further, up to the final version 0.4.8. He then developed Aine from the Hippie code. The Aine bot was a big departure from the C-Alice project in several ways. Firstly, ainebot is written in pure C language, whereas C-Alice and Hippie used C++. It is unclear whether the early versions of C-Alice used C instead of C++. Also, ainebot uses a compiled 'brain' for faster startup and bot-response times. David also re-designed the format of the input files to use a simpler, shorter and easier-to-read langauge which he called Aine Language. Davids work with ainebot followed up on the Hippie version 0.4.8 and he developed ainebot up until version 0.8.8. David incorporated code from both Jacco Bikker and Gary Dubuque which adds features not found in standard implementations of AIML interpreters. Nelson A. de Olivera provided ideas, bug reports, patches and testing of beta versions of ainebot. For awhile (at least in version 0.6), ainebot used code taken from the MegaHAL project, which was written by Jason Hutchens. David Calinski handed over maintenence of ainebot to Chris Todd around 2003. Chris released two ainebot versions, ainebot-8.10 and ainebot-8.12 which included soem bug fixes. He also wrote a simple script (runme.sh) for configuring the sources to include (or not) the optional 'spellcheck' feature. Chris then left the project inactive. Gilbert Ashley started privately hacking and fixing ainebot around 2008. In 2010 he took over maintenance of ainebot with the agreement of David Calinski. Gilbert started by producing cleaned-up versions of the sources which Chris Todd had released. By 2010 they had dissappeared from the internet, so it seemed a good idea to make them available as ainebot-0.9.0. Gilbert then produced several versions (from 0.9.1 to 0.9.5) which were not initially released to the public. Once David gave his OK to Gilbert as the official maintainer of ainebot, the transitional relase ainebot-0.9.6 was created, changing the text and email adresses in the documents and code, as needed. Then the new version and all the un-released ones (0.9.0 to 0.9.5) were finally released to the public. David is still interested in ainebot and kindly provides feedback and ideas to Gilbert on occassion.