While searching for something relatively unrelated, I managed to find a copy of Alicebot Program V floating around the internet somewhere.

Program V is an implementation of an Alice AIML bot written in Perl.

It's a little bit tricky to get it set up and working. When I first found it 5 years ago, I couldn't get it to work; now that I'm better at Perl it still took a bit of tinkering but I managed to get it up and running.

Follow the README that comes with it, first of all. I had to install two Perl modules, and copy some directories around and then I got everything to run relatively fine.

I'm using Fedora, so to install the Perl modules I did:

Code:

yum install perl-Unicode-String
yum install perl-Unicode-Map8 

Additionally, one of the Perl modules caused the scripts to just die. It would say just "died" at one of the modules' lines. It was looking to load Unicode scripts like "unicode/To/Upper.pl" which it couldn't find.

I did a `locate Upper.pl` on my system and found something that looked sorta like what it's trying to find:

Quote:


So I just copied that whole "unicore" directory to my current working directory (inside Program V's directory), and changed its name from "unicore" to "unicode"

Code:

cp -r /usr/lib/perl5/5.10.0/unicore ./
mv unicore unicode 

This let the scripts run without error.

The build.pl script crashed a couple times because certain patterns in the AIML contain invalid characters (notably, an accented É). I fixed these patterns in the AIML by hand until the build.pl was able to run without error. In shell.pl I was able to have a chat with Alice inside my terminal.

Program V can be downloaded here:
http://www.rivescript.com/files/etc/programv-0.08.tar