This post is for everybody interested in learning, what a bot is ( including myself )
I have a second account called @normaluser - I want to make him a friendly and helpful robot.
A robot is a machine, that works on it's own.
I want to set up @normaluser as a machine to work on Steemit - That's called a 'bot'.
As a project it's ment to show, how anybody could make a bot and make his ideas work for him.
The machine first needs an engine and that will probably be a dedicated laptop computer running on an Operating System called Ubuntu.
It might be better to use a virtual machine, but for nostalgia and simplicity I will begin like this.
In the 90's, I had a Computer running Windows 3.11 - and that had a great feature:
It would let you record Makros.
Similar to an Audio or Video recording, you could record all Mouse and Keyboard Input and then replay it.
You could replay it a million times on loop and make your computer do a task over and over again.
You could press 'record',
- open a Text file in the Editor,
- click in the middle of it,
- type 'Hello !',
- save the file, close the Editor and
then press 'stop'
If you ran this recorded Makro 1 million times on loop, and sped it up as fast as possible, it would have created a useless, but big text file faster, than any human could have done by Mouse and Keyboard.
It's a program - kind of pointless, but it worked !
Anybody could create a machine with it.
As a kid, I once created a perpetuum mobile on my computer, only to find out, that a machine, stuck in an infinite loop - is not necessarily a good thing. It made my computer crash.
But ever since then, I was fascinated by the possibilties of computer programs.
Some programs will outlive their creators and already have.
Some bots will live on, long after their human programmers have died.
Isn't that fascinating ? Like Commander Data from Star Trek ?
Jump to 2016 and now I am here, trying to make a bot for Steemit, that does something profitable.
Before I can figure out how to program it - which doesn't seem to be too difficult - let's not worry about details, at this point - I need to figure out what he should be doing, first.
I would like him to be a social bot and in the best case be as friendly as possible.
I also want him to make a profit for himself.
You could help me find some funky algorithms for @normaluser !
To give you a rough idea:
- He could vote on 1 random post every hour: Lottery bot
- He could make 1 'Hello Steemit !' post tagged introduceyourself, then reply 'Hello !' on every comment
- He could vote for your last post automatically, when you transfer SBD to him
- He could decide for you: when you asked him 'A or B', he could randomly pick one: Oracle bot
I could think of much more sophisticated behaviour patterns that would be helpful and I'm sure, you could, too. I hope, I could explain a little better, how I will make this bot work and why I'm not worried, that it will work.
I want to make my first bot with the help of my own little network on SteemIt and you could be part of it - let me know !
Thank you for reading,
have a great day !