How can I program a simple chat bot AI?

Question

I want to build a bot that asks someone a few simple questions and branches based on the answer. I realize parsing meaning from the human responses will be challenging, but how

Answer 1

If you're just dabbling, I believe Pidgin allows you to script chat style behavior. Part of the framework probably tacks the state of who sent the message when, and you'd want to keep a log of your bot's internal state for each of the last N messages. Future state decisions could be hardcoded based on inspection of previous states and the content of the most recent few messages. Or you could do something like the Markov chains discussed and use it both for parsing and generating.