History of ainebot and the Aine Language

The ainebot 'chatbot' is descended from a long line of 'chatbot'
programs designed to use input files written in AIML. AIML stands
for Artifical Intelligence Markup Language. The Aine Language is
based on AIML.

The AIML language was originally designed by Dr. Richard Wallace
and the first AIML interpreter was written in the 'setl' language.
It later came to be know as 'Program M'. Dr. Wallace also wrote the
original CGI version of C-Alice and wrote the 'classify' C program.
He also created and refined the original A.L.I.C.E. 'personality'.

Jacco Bikker wrote the original C(++??) code for C-Alice which was the
basis for the following versions. Much of the code still found in the
ainebot interpreters was originally by him. Jacco later started his
own project called WinAlice which provides an alice-based interface
for the Windows OS.

Gary Dubuque developed Program N (also called AIMLpad), based on 
Jacco's AliCE (Alice on WinCE) implementation.
	
Philippe Raxhon wrote the program wxAlice, an AIML interface which
used the wxWindows GUI library. Ainebot includes the sources for
'wxAine' which is based on wxAlice.

Terry Welch wrote an eggdrop script for use with C-Alice. It has been
adapted for ainebot and is included with the sources.

Chicoine Rejean modified the eggdrop script so that it worked with
private messages and when the bots name is called.

Stephen Logan provided a perl script for using C-Alice on IRC.

Jedi Striker provided a TCP/IP version of Alice.

Many others contributed to the C-Alice project and/or the JAVA version
of alice which influenced the C-Alice project. They include:
Kirk Munoz, Diana Andreacchio, Sergey Bogdanov and Conan Callen.
Many others from the C-Alice mailing list and from equality.ipa.net
provided testing and bug-fixes which improved the C-Alice code.

Anthony Taylor ported C-Alice to Unix and later developed the 'Hippie'
chatbot based on the original C-Alice sources. He developed 'Hippie'
up to version 0.2.7.

Philippe Raxhon provided many bug fixes, and code suggestions, and also 
came up with the idea and implementation of init files for C-Alice. His
code was also implemented in Hippie.
  
David Calinski developed Hippie further, up to the final version 0.4.8.
He then developed Aine from the Hippie code. The Aine bot was a big
departure from the C-Alice project in several ways. Firstly, ainebot
is written in pure C language, whereas C-Alice and Hippie used C++. It
is unclear whether the early versions of C-Alice used C instead of C++.
Also, ainebot uses a compiled 'brain' for faster startup and bot-response
times. David also re-designed the format of the input files to use a
simpler, shorter and easier-to-read langauge which he called Aine Language.
Davids work with ainebot followed up on the Hippie version 0.4.8 and he
developed ainebot up until version 0.8.8. David incorporated code from
both Jacco Bikker and Gary Dubuque which adds features not found in
standard implementations of AIML interpreters.

Nelson A. de Olivera provided ideas, bug reports, patches and testing 
of beta versions of ainebot.

For awhile (at least in version 0.6), ainebot used code taken from
the MegaHAL project, which was written by Jason Hutchens.

David Calinski handed over maintenence of ainebot to Chris Todd
around 2003. Chris released two ainebot versions, ainebot-8.10 and 
ainebot-8.12 which included soem bug fixes. He also wrote a simple
script (runme.sh) for configuring the sources to include (or not) 
the optional 'spellcheck' feature. Chris then left the project inactive.

Gilbert Ashley started privately hacking and fixing ainebot around 
2008. In 2010 he took over maintenance of ainebot with the agreement
of David Calinski. Gilbert started by producing cleaned-up versions 
of the sources which Chris Todd had released. By 2010 they had 
dissappeared from the internet, so it seemed a good idea to make 
them available as ainebot-0.9.0. Gilbert then produced several 
versions (from 0.9.1 to 0.9.5) which were not initially released to
the public. Once David gave his OK to Gilbert as the official maintainer
of ainebot, the transitional relase ainebot-0.9.6 was created, changing
the text and email adresses in the documents and code, as needed. Then
the new version and all the un-released ones (0.9.0 to 0.9.5) were
finally released to the public. David is still interested in ainebot 
and kindly provides feedback and ideas to Gilbert on occassion.