Anyway, I've now completed a full “solitaire” game of the #Python reimplementation of my #Ruby #IRC #bot #Machiavelli plugin (hashtag galore yeah), so I believe the logic itself to be robust enough. The next step would be to start interfacing it with Mastodon. One thing that worries me is that the table can get rather largish, which may trip the character limit.

So I've started porting my #Machiavelli #Ruby #IRC #bot #plugin (how's that for hashtags, uh?) to #Python, which has been a rather frustrating experience so far. I'm much more comfortable with Ruby than Python, but the languages are similar enough that the differences fall into that grating #uncannyValley experience. Also lots of bugs due to syntactical and behavioral differences (e.g. index() raising an exception instead of returning the null type). But things are moving forward.

I almost forgot the most important and difficult aspect of this: what should I call it? What would a good name for a #Fediverse #bot used to play #Machiavelli?

I've been thinking that something like @ihabunek `toot` could work as a basis for the bot. I haven't checked yet if it can be used as a #Python library, but worst case scenario I can probably shell out to it and use it literally as just I would any other CLI tool (bonus: I wouldn't have to port the #Ruby code of my #Machiavelli #IRC‌ #bot to Python 8-D).

One of the things that made writing my #Machiavelli #IRC #bot easy was that I could work on an existing IRC bot infrastructure (the Machiavelli game feature was just a plugin). So last night I tried looking for something similar for #ActivityPub, browsing the botwiki website without much success. There are interactive bots, even open source ones, but I couldn't find anything that would allow a bot to be written with just some glue for something more sophisticated than an image poster. #AskFedi

One of my favorite #cardGames is #Machiavelli, similar to #Rummy but where the players have the opportunity to rearrange all played groups and runs as they please to make it easier to add their cards (as long as at the end of the play everything on the table is valid).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavelli_(Italian_card_game)

I've found enough time today to set up the infrastructure for #LAN play for the #Machiavelli bot I'm writing. It's the opposite of refined, and barely functional. In particular, expect delivery issues for messages in multi-player at the moment because the server basically brute-force sending, which as anybody that has don any decent socket programming knows, it's the worst possible way to do things.

On an unrelated note, I hate socket programming.