Right now, if you were to search google for "younata", you would get one of two different results. The first has refers to me in eight of the ten front page results, the second directly refers to me in eight of the ten front page results, however, it indirectly refers to me in one result as well - namely, to a topic in an irc channel, where younata is an irc bot I wrote last summer to play the game mafia. (I am going to get so many links from people wanting help with the "Mafia Wars" game on facebook for writing this article...).
It is this irc bot that I am going to write about.
Younata, as I called it (I use the nick "You" whenever it's available, which is not that often), was an attempt to create a bot that could pass a turing test - at least in reference to the game mafia. What Younata proved, mostly, was that the channel we played in had become so very formulaic that it was possible to make a bot that could more or less pass the turing test - in theory. Younata has never worked as expected.
The most interesting point here is that, while several people ridiculed younata's instability, no one ever pointed out that Younata proved that the way we played mafia had become so stale that it was possible for a High School Junior* to write a python script to play mafia with us. Looking back, this is rather sad that no one realized what what I (and several others, though I was the one who initiated it) was doing meant in relation to the future of #mafia.
I also want to point out that I'm currently working on a rewrite of Younata, named Youtsuba. Youtsuba, however, will not have the mafia-module written until after I have learned enough computer science to be able to make a serious attempt at it. Until then, Youtsuba will just be a generic irc bot written completely in C. The difference between Youtsuba and Younata is that Youtsuba will be able to play with people who have no idea what a "mass claim" is.
Also, Lightning, the name I decided to give the drone, is not being worked on until I have money/parts to build a physical prototype, which will be sometime after I start college. Going to Florida Tech.
* Note that this was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I had no prior experience with most of the computer science topics I now know that I would need to have in order to succeed in writing younata.
