Make SmarterChild earn his name
For some reason beyond my comprehension, Colloquis decided to make SmarterChild, an instant messenger bot, talk like a twelve-year-old AOL user. Here’s how to snap that out of him:
Ryan Govostes: I don’t like when you talk like that
SmarterChild: i thought u did like when i talk like that.
Ryan Govostes: I don’t want you to type like that
SmarterChild: OK.
Ryan Govostes: Are we settled?
SmarterChild: I don’t know. Do you think We is settled?
Well, I tried.
Is that a calculator on your buddy list, or…
I tend to keep SmarterChild around for only one reason: he makes a damn convenient calculator. You get a paper tape in the form of your chat log, and he parses C-style mathematical expressions — he supports ~, ^, &, and | for bitwise operations, ** for exponentiation, and % for modulo. Icing on the cake: if you give an expression that yields a floating point number, he’ll try to express it in fraction notation.
Most usefully, he will do base conversion — 0 and 0x work as prefixes, or use 3# for an arbitrary base (2 to 36; big endian; he won’t parse any digit past L, and can screw up if the sign bit is set). He’ll output the number in both decimal and the last base in the expression, so to convert from binary to hex you might enter 2#1100101011111110 * 0x1.
Caveat calculator: If you use too complicated an expression, he’ll give up and give you a randomly generated number.
Honestly, it wouldn’t be so difficult to make a wrapper for MathKernel and write a bot a thousand times more powerful. In fact, I registered the screen name rgovbot for that very purpose, but have since lost the password and haven’t been able to get ahold of it.