During college, I was hooked on IRC.  I used to spend a lot of time on it.  I also took a course in Unix/C programming, so as part of a side project, I developed an IRC Poker Bot.  I recollected many good memories, and definitely learned a great deal from it.

I passed on the code to Pierre Fournier and Yves Lepage for maintenance and further development.  They took it as far as they could, before eventually retired it.  I’m grateful for their involvement and dedication to it!

Below was Pierre’s entry in Wikipedia about the poker bot.  Wikipedia is about to delete this entry due to “lack of interest”.  So I’m posting it here for posterity.

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PBot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

PBot was a computer program that ran on Internet Relay Chat in the EFnet channel #poker which allowed users to play poker with fictional money. Based on standard 5-card draw poker game, the bot could handle up to 6 players and was in service between 1993 and 2002.

History

PBot was originally written by Rudy “Radix” Amid. In early 1993, after the success of his first IRC game “MooBot” ^[1], he went on to think that someone would be inspired to make a poker bot. Of course, no one seemed to have the time or the inclination to make such a bot, so he went on in February 1993 to start making a poker bot.

Radix era

Radix completed an alpha version of PBot in late February and tested it on EFnet IRC. It wasn’t as easy as he expected; the bot was riddled with all sorts of mysterious bugs as he was testing the user interface aspect. The bot was written with ircII scripts and the poker module was written in C. It didn’t take long for him to realize this 80% ircII scripts bot was not fast and powerful, but it was the best way to debug and perfect the command line parsing; recompiling the program on the fly without killing the bot. By March 1993, he started to put the poker module together as one big C program, eliminating the need to rely on ircII scripts to parse the commands. The bot at this point had many commands and was flexible enough to program. From then on, he concentrated on the poker game itself.

By late March, he was ready for PBot’s beta-testing. He called on a few dedicated users on IRC to discuss ideas and play the game. There were lots of ideas and modifications to be made. Tweaking the program proved to be the hardest. Slowly, after one feature was added at a time, bugs appeared and debugged. The process was painstakingly slow but he was determined to get it up and running, as he knew this bot would prove to be the best bot that ever happened to IRC. After his exams in April, he started to work full time on this bot. Spending countless hours modifying and testing with his beta-testers. Ideas kept pouring in.

Finally, in June, he had a fully functional poker bot. Modifications did not stop then but it was time for him to slow down and let the bot make itself known to the world. In August 1993, he had to leave the country for a few months, and have given this bot to Lyverbe for safe keeping, continued maintenance, and development of PBot.

Lyverbe era

At that time, the main goal of PBot to handle an IRC poker game was successfully achieved. Lyverbe’s goal was to add features, security and documentation to the software. He introduced:

• User privileges (known as Gods and Cops)
• Banning system
• Flood protection
• Account database
• DCC connections
• Complete online help
• Player personal setup
• Top winners list
• …and many more

With the code getting insanely bigger, he separated the single source file into multiple source files. Managing the code was half the work where the other half was managing the IRC channel itself, and this is why he created user privileges to help him out while being away. These users had additional commands to handle troublemakers.

In a short period of time, PBot gained a lot of popularity. On January 9 1995, a mailing list was created as well as a website, which was not that common back then. Two conventions were held with the first one in Montreal (August 4-6, 1995) and the second in Chicago (August 2-3, 1996). A GUI was created for the mIRC client ^[2].

Post Lyverbe era

In September 1996, after 3 years of constant work on this project, Lyverbe decided to let go. He gave the project to Cirra who moved the bot from EFnet to Undernet. She eventually gave the project to Jupiter1.

PBot stopped operating in late 2002. However, the code is still in working condition meaning that it could reappear at anytime.

During its decade of existence, PBot has created new rings of friends ^[3] with a common place to hang out and chat. Conversations have even created its own glossary of terms^[4]. Tournaments have been organized ^[5] to create variety in the standard routine game.

See also

• Internet Relay Chat
• IRC bot

References

External links

• The Realm of Undernet IRC Poker

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Tags: chat, games, irc, software, wikipedia