Achille is a chatterbot written by H_I. It is on IRC in #nancy. It is based on a ancient vladbot, written in C.
Like Eliza, it reacts on keywords, but it also knows its users and likes or dislikes them (according to what they already said). It reacts differently, depending on this.
It hopefully will have a spiritual son: ECTOR. And hopefully, it will be more intelligent, if not only more sophisticated.
Once upon a time, a computer science PhD student went on IRC, where he learned what a bot was: a program which was also connected and could interact with users. But what poor interactions!
Only "physical" ones (kick, ban, topic changes, ...). The student thought: "Could I make a bot talk?"
He finds a bot's source code (a vladbot2.1h), modifies it a bit, and makes it react to a particular sentence: when someone says "hello", the bot responds "hello". "A bit limited," the student says. "When someone says hello to anyone else, the bot reacts. This should be
modified." As the bot has a name (Achille, which is the French counterpart of Achilles), it can react when its name is in the sentence (or when it is concerned). And so it is: the bot says "hello" only when someone says "Hello Achille", or "Hello folks".
The student makes Achille reacting to some other stimuli
("bye", "how are you", and so on). To make it more realistic, the bot gives different answers to the same stimulus ("Bye", "It was nice to meet you", etc.).
As the student discovers IRC, he realizes that some humans are antipathetic with Achille. So the bot should not answer the same way to all IRC users. It may now like or dislike users according to what they already said to it (and also to what they say and do on IRC channels where the bot is).
The students disliked the fact that he has to modify the bot's source code every time he wants to add an answers or a stimulus. So it programs a way for the users to teach the bot stimuli and answers. But only beloved users!
But Achille, can't converse in a really intelligent manner. Alone, it can't sustain a conversation with a human. However, it is adapted to IRC: on a channel where many humans talk, it only reacts when it knows answers.
As the student pass its PhD on an Artificial Intelligence architecture, he thinks that it could be applied to a more intelligent bot than Achille. It would be named ECTOR. However, it is likely that it will not be as impressive as Achille (in the beginning): it has to learn many things before!