Markov Chain April Fool's Day Bot
On the 1st of April 2022, the JADS moderators carried out their April fools' joke of activating a Discord bot created by the mod Nodja which would periodically post messages generated by an AI in the Dragon's Den channel. The bot would also change its name and profile picture to match one random JADS user for each message, and the message it posted would be based entirely off the messages that user had typed in Dragon's Den previously. The bot ran from midnight to midnight GMT+1, and it posted one message every 20 seconds. It used a technique called a Markov chain[1], which means that it took all of a users' messages, chose one at random, and at a random point in that message it would cut it off and append to it part of another message that began with the same word that the fragment of the previous message ended with. It could do this to combine several messages together into one new message.
For the first 12 hours, the bot would choose which user to imitate based on the total number of messages they had sent in Dragon's Den. Users who had sent more messages were more likely to get chosen. Then Nodja changed it so that it chose the last user to send a message before the bot would generate its own message, in an attempt to get it to more often imitate users who were active at the time but didn't have that many messages in the channel. But when people figured this out quickly, he changed the code again, and challenged everyone to figure out how it was working after the change. Eventually people figured out that it had a 20% chance to pick one user completely at random, and an 80% chance to pick one user who had sent a message between the bots previous message and its next message. While this was going on, it created a movement of people trying to get the bot to choose them as many times as possible, with no regard to the actual content of the messages.
However, Nodja would also break the rules sometimes, and force the bot to either imitate a specific user or begin its messages with a specific word. During the last 2 hours or so of the bots activity, he did this non-stop, cycling between different users and starting words to produce specific outcomes similar to messages which people had found funny before. While this was going on and during the hours leading up to it, it created a movement of people anticipating the bot creating funny messages, with no regard to which user it was imitating (the exact opposite of earlier). People started referring to the funny messages as "bangers", and would say either "banger" or "not banger" after each one.
A few hours before this event started, all of the JADS mods started changing their profile pictures to versions which looked like the profile picture of the server's resident discord bot, Botseph. They also changed their names to have the word "bot" in them, and they started talking in all caps and formatted their messages as in-lined code.
Two of the most popular messages which you can still see people quote sometimes are MY COCK AND BALL and HAHA SUS HAHA SUS HAHA SUS HAHA SUS HAHA SUS HAHA IM GOING TO TURN THAT FUCKER IN TBH.
Hypothetical Walrus created a montage of some of the best messages the bot generated in 2022[2]
The bot was brought back for April Fools Day 2024.
Nodja later created a website in which you can view archives of the bot messages from all of the past years it was deployed[3]
