Could we expand on the “wiki-def” or link bot, the bot that lets you type “.wiki” in chat and get a link to the wiki, so that we can querry EteRNA databases and get useful links?
I wanted to know what the smallest winning 100 score synthesized Lab ID was, so I could look up the puzzle and do some hand work on an idea. But I don’t know how to do that easily.
Surely the bot could safely query some or all of our databases and return a link to an answer page. Maybe it could just forward a query to be reviewed by the devs and they could either act or not as deemed appropriate.
We definitely need a better way to find the past labs that are relevant to whatever we are wanting to research. You mentioned two, puzzle size and the existence of a 100 score. Some others are the existence of a desired structural motif, the number of sequences synthesized, the conditions of the synthesis, chemical probing and analysis, etc. Although I have given some thought to it on the wiki, the current version of my data mining tool focuses entirely on analyzing data from one lab at a time. It does nothing to help find the labs of interest.
I would break your suggestion up into two parts. The first is to create a database of lab features along with a useful query interface. This is the harder part, but it can be done by anyone with the technical skills. That is, it doesn’t require access to the Eterna servers or active cooperation from the devs. The second part is integrating it with the Eterna GUI. This might be through the chat interface, but if the queries can get complex, that might not be the best option. (The devs plan on improving the scripting interface and interacting it more tightly with the game, so that’s another possibility.)
If a player/programmer/scripter does want to tackle this, I’ll be happy to share the experience I’ve gained working with the Eterna data and devs in the process of developing my data mining tool.
BTW, it’s a very rudimentary way of finding labs, but the wiki’s list of past labs is a useful resource. Its relatively compact display allows me to scan quickly for labs of possible interest.
Could you list around a dozen queries you want to see results for. That would give
someone crazy enough to tackle this a better chance of “where is this info.” and
what’s the best way to access it.
More thoughts
LinkBot is like a google query that uses keywords to access information in
a dictionary. a Dictionary is just a collection of info stored somewhere. in this case it is stored in wiki. LinkBot should be able to be cloned and redirected to another
dictionary. For instance . if Eli put up all his documents on the web, a EliBot could
access that information by keyword, building up a keyword language.
Not much programming is necessary I would think. The devs could tell you what are
the problems.
JL has a script that accesses lab data but would be too slow for chat type access.
His script would be better dumped into other script(s) for faster access by
keywords much like puzzle search has. I did this with a parse script and is very
fast.
You still would need what info you are after or better yet what keywords and
keyword strings do you want to use to narrow down the information.
So
ask dev if a clone of linkbot would work. and how much work.
Another way to go is a to give users the ability to tag labs and then select labs
from a tag list. Then subset by user name so multiple users can use the same tag list.
