AI Bots

AI Bots

AI Bots are computer-controlled opponents available in Super-Shiritori. Each bot operates under one of nineteen personalities — a set of word-selection rules that determines the kind of word it looks for on its turn. A personality can be assigned at random when an AI is invited into a game, triggered manually with a dedicated chat command, or switched automatically as a game progresses. Two further AI types, the Sniper AI and Assassin AI, layer additional mechanics on top of this base system. This page describes AI Bots as they work in Multiplayer Shiritori; Solo Shiritori uses the same underlying personality and word-selection system for its single AI opponent, though without Sniper AI, Assassin AI, or the manual summon commands. AI Bots have no presence in Protori at all — attempting to invite one there is rejected outright.

Overview

An AI opponent is added to an ongoing multiplayer Shiritori game with the /invite_ai command, provided no AI is already present in that game. Its starting personality is chosen at random from a fixed set of natural spawn weights (see Personalities below); heavier-weighted personalities such as AVERAGE and ROOKIE are more likely to appear than rarer ones such as NOOB or ASSASSIN. Once summoned, the AI waits two to three seconds before playing each word.

Players can override whichever personality is currently active by typing that personality's dedicated chat command (for example, !pro to force a switch to PRO). Each command has its own cooldown and its own chance of actually succeeding; a failed attempt leaves the current AI in place. An AI opponent that receives no valid input for five minutes automatically leaves the game with the message:

"⏳ {personality} AI has lost interest and left! Do /invite_ai to reinvite one."

The /murder_ai command removes the active AI outright. Against any personality other than ASSASSIN, this always succeeds; see Assassin AI below for the special case.

Personalities

The table below lists all nineteen personalities, the manual chat command used to force a switch to that personality, that command's cooldown and success chance, the personality's weight in the natural random-spawn pool, and a summary of how it chooses words. Word-selection rules are evaluated against the dictionary words that legally follow the previous word's last letter; where a personality's preferred pool turns up empty, it falls back to a broader rule rather than failing to move.

Personality	Command	Cooldown	Success chance	Spawn weight	Word selection
NOOB	!noob	1 minute	100%	1.0%	1–5 letters; no hyphens or apostrophes; must contain a vowel.
ROOKIE	!rookie	2 minutes	85%	12.0%	3–9 letters; at most one hyphen; never both a hyphen and an apostrophe.
AVERAGE	!average	3 minutes	75%	15.0%	4–12 letters; never both a hyphen and an apostrophe.
PRO	!pro	10 minutes	50%	10.0%	12 letters or longer.
FAVORITIST	!fav	12 minutes	55%	7.0%	Rolls a random "favorite" letter on first becoming active and, for the rest of that stint, only plays words ending in it; re-rolls the favorite letter the next time it becomes active again.
NUMBERPHILE	!numbers	13 minutes	50%	6.0%	Only plays spelled-out numbers (e.g. seventeen), including hyphenated compounds such as twenty-one.
FEARLESS	!boo	13 minutes	50%	5.0%	Draws only from a curated list of phobia-related terms; falls back to any valid word if none are available.
MINIMALIST	!minimal	14 minutes	45%	4.0%	1–3 letters; falls back to ROOKIE's 3–9 letter range if none are available.
PASTER	!paster	15 minutes	45%	2.0%	30 letters or longer.
VOWELLESS	!vowelless	15 minutes	45%	2.0%	Contains no vowels; falls back to NOOB's rules if no vowel-free word is available.
PALINDROMIC	!palindrome	15 minutes	45%	2.5%	Only plays palindromes; falls back to AVERAGE's rules if none are available.
MIMIC	!mimic	16 minutes	40%	8.0%	Tries to play an anagram of the previous player's word; if that word contained a hyphen or apostrophe, matches its hyphen/apostrophe count instead; otherwise falls back to any hyphen- and apostrophe-free word.
CONNOISSEUR	!yumyum	15 minutes	45%	5.5%	Prefers a curated list of food and drink vocabulary; falls back to any valid word.
FLORIOGRAPHIST	!flower	17 minutes	40%	3.5%	Prefers a curated list of plant and flower names; falls back to any valid word.
GEOGRAPHICAL-WIZARD	!tnym	17 minutes	42%	4.5%	Prefers country and place names; falls back to any valid word.
ASTRONOMER	!spacey	19 minutes	35%	3.0%	Prefers a curated list of space and astronomy vocabulary; falls back to any valid word.
POKEFAN	!pajokeamon	15 minutes	45%	1.5%	Prefers Pokémon species names; falls back to any valid word.
LINGUIST	!lang	18 minutes	33%	6.5%	Prefers language names; falls back to any valid word.
ASSASSIN	!assassin	15 minutes	40%	1.0%	See Assassin AI below.

History

VOWELLESS had a complete, working set of word-selection rules from early on, but for a period was entirely unreachable in practice: it was missing from the natural spawn-weight table, so it could never be chosen by /invite_ai or a dynamic personality switch, and had no manual chat command of its own. It was subsequently added to the spawn table — sharing the lowest weight tier with PASTER — and given the dedicated !vowelless command listed above.

Dynamic personality switching

A regular (non-Sniper, non-Assassin-locked) AI opponent does not necessarily keep the same personality for an entire game. Every ten rounds of play (round 10, 20, 30, and so on), there is a 70% chance the AI re-rolls its personality. The odds used for this roll start as a copy of the natural spawn weights above, but drift as the game goes on: each time a re-roll occurs, one randomly chosen personality's weight shifts up or down by five percentage points (bounded between 1% and 95%), and the difference is redistributed across the remaining personalities. This means the effective odds of any given personality appearing can diverge noticeably from the base table by the end of a long game. When a switch occurs, the bot announces it in the channel:

"AI personality re-evaluated! Now playing as {personality}."

If a dynamic switch lands on ASSASSIN, the player whose word triggered that turn is credited with surviving it — see Related achievements below.

Sniper AI

Sniper AI is a one-shot opponent, separate from the personality system above, that plays a single dramatic word and then leaves. It can appear in a multiplayer Shiritori game in two ways:

• Naturally: after every word a human player plays, there is a 0.1% (1 in 1,000) chance that Sniper AI takes that turn instead of whichever regular AI personality is currently active.
• Manually: the !snipe command (10-minute cooldown) attempts to summon Sniper AI on demand, but only succeeds 20% of the time. On failure, Sniper AI responds with one of several dismissive rejection lines, for example:

"SNIPER AI: I don't do charity shots."

Once triggered, Sniper AI selects a word at random from the 350 longest words in the dictionary (ten letters or more, computed once at startup) that begin with the required letter and have not already been played. If no such word exists, it declines with:

"🔭 Sniper AI peered through the scope but saw no opening..."

A natural spawn that finds no word grants the AWOL achievement to the player whose word triggered the Sniper's turn; a self-summoned !snipe that finds no word grants Wrong Timing instead.

If a word is found, it is subject to the same AI failure event check as a regular AI turn before being played. On success, the event is logged (natural and summoned encounters are counted separately and persisted) to a designated log channel, and to any channel a server has separately configured for it. Successfully summoning Sniper AI via !snipe grants the Sniper's Mark achievement.

Sniper AI cannot appear in Protori matches; attempting !snipe there is rejected outright.

Assassin AI

ASSASSIN can appear as a personality like any other — through the natural spawn pool, a dynamic switch, or the dedicated !assassin command — and while active, uses its own word-selection rule: it prioritizes possessive words (ending in an apostrophe) within ROOKIE's 3–9 letter range, falling back to ROOKIE's ordinary rules if no possessive word is available.

Summoning with !assassin

!assassin (15-minute cooldown) has a 40% chance to succeed. On success, it replaces whatever AI personality is currently active with ASSASSIN outright, bypassing the normal spawn odds, and grants the invoking player the Assassin's Ally achievement:

"🔪 ASSASSIN AI silently disposes of the {previous personality} AI and takes control!"

The remaining 60% of attempts fail, silencing the invoking player until 30 more valid words have been played by anyone in the game:

"🔪 The ASSASSIN AI deems you unworthy. You are silenced until 30 more valid words are played."

Only one Assassin AI can hold control of a game at a time.

/murder_ai and Assassin AI

/murder_ai is guaranteed to remove any personality other than ASSASSIN and grants the Murder Most Foul achievement:

"🗡️ The deed is done. The AI collapses and the arena exhales."

Against ASSASSIN specifically, the odds invert: /murder_ai succeeds only 1% of the time, granting Assassin's Bane:

"🩸💀 A whisper cuts through the void... The unthinkable happens. `ASSASSIN AI` falls to your blade. The arena grows still."

The other 99% of attempts backfire, silencing the invoking player until 120 more valid words have been played — four times the penalty for a failed !assassin summon:

"🔪 The ASSASSIN AI anticipates your strike and turns your will to silence. You are muted for the next 120 valid words."

A player who has earned both Murder Most Foul and Assassin's Bane unlocks New Assassin.

AI failure event

Every time any AI — whether a regular personality or Sniper AI — is about to play a word, there is a 1 in 27,963,028 chance that it instead plays a word that does not start with the required letter, an outcome the game treats as an AI malfunction. When it triggers, the game ends immediately with a message in the AI's own voice:

"NO WAY the AI failed like it failed yk how rare that is its like 1/(27,963,028) thats like 0.0000035761% like your lucky or unlucky no way? i guess the AI failed geez? you won? i think?"

The first player to witness this — whether from a regular AI or from Sniper AI — is awarded the Man Beats Machine achievement.

Statistics

The table below combines each command's manual success chance with the 1 in 27,963,028 AI failure roll to give the true odds of witnessing an AI failure immediately after successfully summoning that personality with its dedicated command (or, for Sniper AI, after a successful natural spawn or !snipe summon). These are derived figures, not values stored directly in the game's configuration.

AI	Summon success	Combined odds	Combined odds (%)
NOOB	100%	1 in 27,963,028	0.0000035761%
ROOKIE	85%	1 in 32,897,680	0.0000030402%
AVERAGE	75%	1 in 37,284,037	0.0000026822%
PRO	50%	1 in 55,926,056	0.0000017880%
FAVORITIST	55%	1 in 50,841,869	0.0000019669%
NUMBERPHILE	50%	1 in 55,926,056	0.0000017880%
FEARLESS	50%	1 in 55,926,056	0.0000017880%
MINIMALIST	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
PASTER	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
VOWELLESS	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
PALINDROMIC	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
CONNOISSEUR	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
POKEFAN	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
GEOGRAPHICAL-WIZARD	42%	1 in 66,578,638	0.0000015020%
MIMIC	40%	1 in 69,907,570	0.0000014305%
FLORIOGRAPHIST	40%	1 in 69,907,570	0.0000014305%
ASSASSIN (via !assassin)	40%	1 in 69,907,570	0.0000014305%
ASTRONOMER	35%	1 in 79,894,366	0.0000012517%
LINGUIST	33%	1 in 84,736,448	0.0000011801%
SNIPER (via !snipe)	20%	1 in 139,815,140	0.0000007152%
SNIPER (natural spawn)	0.1%	1 in 27,963,028,000	0.0000000036%

To witness a naturally spawned Sniper AI fail is roughly a 1-in-28-billion event.

Related achievements

Achievement	Unlocked by
Sniper's Mark	Successfully summoning Sniper AI with !snipe.
Assassin's Ally	Successfully hijacking the active AI with !assassin.
Survived!	Having the active AI dynamically switch into ASSASSIN during your turn.
Man Beats Machine	Witnessing the AI failure event on any AI turn, including Sniper AI.
Murder Most Foul	Removing a non-Assassin AI with /murder_ai.
Assassin's Bane	Removing an Assassin AI with /murder_ai (a 1% chance).
New Assassin	Earning both Murder Most Foul and Assassin's Bane.
AWOL	A naturally-spawned Sniper AI finding no valid word to play.
Wrong Timing	A Sniper AI summoned via !snipe finding no valid word to play.
Ghosted	Attempting /invite_ai during an active Protori match, which has no AI-opponent support at all.

See also

• Super-Shiritori
• Achievements
• Protori
• Multiplayer Shiritori
• Solo Shiritori