While reading Sherry Turkle‘s “Life on Screen” I was fascinated by the chatterbot Julia she describes early in the book. I rose the challenge of coding a simple chatter bot myself in PureBasic, a language I am quite famliar with. For three days now I am working in a bricolage process on the code and its functions, (procedures in PureBasic), and it’s working – a little – but I am patient and add line by line to the code on a daily basis.

Right now I am not certain about Difi’s personality or even its gender. Difi stands for Digital Fidelity and hence is pretty open to interpretation. And I am playing with the thought of making a German version of it, connecting it to the Ö3 chat and just have fun reading the log-files…

Difi even has a function for making “accurate” typos when in competitive mode. “Accurate” means, that Difi hits the correct neighboring keys on the keyboard instead (or additionally) to the right ones. If Difi gets sleepier, he/she/it will make more and more typos.

if you click this post’s thumbnail you’ll see a picture of Difi’s source code for answering a “what’s up” question.