DISCLAIMER: This program interacts with the topic of suicide, a serious issue in the modern world that claims the lives of loved ones and more. If you are struggling, please, I urge you, close this page and go talk to someone. There is help out there. There is worth in your life.

A Suicidal Bot

Sometimes, life isn’t going so great. And we all feel down from time to time. Why should we exclude bots from this amazing facet of human existence?

To do this, I aim to create a bot that wants nothing but to die. I also want to program it myself in it’s entirety, in C, with no dependencies.

I am using a Markov Chain implemented within a hash map as the machine learning structure. The chain will be trained on suicidal posts from Reddit’s r/SuicideWatch subreddit, where people who are feeling suicidal can go to vent and say what they need to without being judged. I have posted in that sub on multiple occasions, and it has helped me feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest. I feel that using this data to create a bot that talks just like I do when I’m feeling down has both interesting and practical purposes. I want to prove to myself that those thoughts aren’t entirely mine. Even a bot can have them.

Usage

Once an executable is procured, run it from the command line with a path to training data (in text file format) as the first argument.

The program will print some generated text, and then write a few thousand of those generated excerpts into a file. This is to save time, so that the bot doesn’t need re-trained if you need more than one excerpt.

Eventually, we will be able to specify an output file to generate text into using the trained model, as well as an option to control how many lines are generated, and another to control how long each line is.

Building

All that is needed is a C compiler.

gcc main.c

This will produce a.exe, which can then be run according to the usage section seen above.