AI Bots

AI Bots

AI Bots are computer-controlled opponents available in Super-Shiritori. Each bot operates under one of twenty-six 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, the manual summon commands, or LARP — LARP is deliberately left out of Solo Shiritori's personality pool entirely, since it depends on a real server member to impersonate and a multiplayer-only leaderboard that Solo Shiritori's private practice thread has no equivalent of. 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 twenty-six 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%	10.45%	3–9 letters; at most one hyphen; never both a hyphen and an apostrophe.
AVERAGE	!average	3 minutes	75%	11.45%	4–12 letters; never both a hyphen and an apostrophe.
PRO	!pro	10 minutes	50%	8.45%	12 letters or longer.
FAVORITIST	!fav	12 minutes	55%	5.45%	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; if no vowel-free word exists for the required letter, passes the turn entirely rather than playing one that does (see History below).
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%	6.45%	Tries to play an exact anagram of the previous player's word; failing that, plays the word closest to it by edit (Levenshtein) distance instead (see History below).
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.
CHEMIST	!chem	18 minutes	35%	1.75%	Prefers a curated list of chemistry vocabulary, avoiding InChIKey-format entries (long machine-generated chemical identifiers, technically valid dictionary words but not real chemical names) when a proper chemistry word is available; falls back to InChIKeys, then to PRO's 12+-letter rule, then to any valid word.
GEOLOGIST	!geo	16 minutes	40%	1.5%	Prefers a curated list of mineral and geology vocabulary; falls back to any valid word.
MATHEMATICIAN	!x	15 minutes	42%	1.5%	Prefers a curated list of mathematics vocabulary; falls back to any valid word.
DOCTRINAIRE	!ismism	15 minutes	45%	1.5%	Prefers a curated list of ideology, religion, and cult-related vocabulary; falls back to any valid word.
COLORPICKER	!rgb	16 minutes	40%	1.5%	Prefers a curated list of color names; falls back to any valid word.
WITCH-DOCTOR	!doc	15 minutes	45%	1.5%	Prefers a curated list of anatomy, physiology, and pathology vocabulary; falls back to any valid word.
ASSASSIN	!assassin	15 minutes	40%	1.0%	See Assassin AI below.
LARP	!larp	30 minutes	0.5%	0.5%	See LARP 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.

VOWELLESS previously fell back to a short (1–5 letter) word containing a vowel whenever no vowel-free word existed for the required letter — the exact thing it's supposed to never do. Since no word beginning with a vowel can itself be vowel-free, this fallback was firing on roughly one in every four or five turns, not as a rare edge case. It now passes the turn entirely instead: in Multiplayer Shiritori this is silent, simply handing the turn back to the next human player; in Solo Shiritori (a strict two-player loop with no one else to hand the turn to) it instead announces that VOWELLESS "leaves" and is immediately replaced by a freshly-rolled personality — never VOWELLESS or LARP again — that takes the same turn in its place.

MIMIC previously matched an exact anagram of the previous word when one existed (rare) and otherwise fell back to matching only the previous word's hyphen/apostrophe count — effectively a near-random pick with no real resemblance to what was just played. It now falls back to the real dictionary word closest to the previous one by edit (Levenshtein) distance instead, timeboxed to roughly 5 seconds so an unusually long search can't stall a turn; whatever is best-so-far when that budget runs out is what gets played.

CHEMIST, GEOLOGIST, MATHEMATICIAN, DOCTRINAIRE, and COLORPICKER were added as a set of new dictionary-linked personalities. GEOLOGIST, MATHEMATICIAN, DOCTRINAIRE, and COLORPICKER draw from existing /dictionaries categories (Geology, Mathology, Ideologies/Religions/Cults, and Colorology respectively) that had simply never had a personality attached to them before. CHEMIST is paired with a brand-new "Chemistry" category, added at the same time — its backing word list already existed in the dictionary and had quietly been wired into two unrelated curator-facing systems for a while, but had never been exposed as its own browsable category until now. Adding CHEMIST alone pushed the underlying probability table fractionally over 100%, which silently forced the auto-computed spawn weight for ASSASSIN negative — undetected until it was caught during the follow-up work adding the other four, since the crash it would eventually have caused (a negative weight breaking the random draw) hadn't yet been triggered. Fixed by trimming five percentage points off the five most common personalities (reflected in the table above) rather than off ASSASSIN, restoring its original 1.0% weight exactly.

CHEMIST briefly had a real wiring gap after it first shipped: its word list was only ever populated by the periodic dictionary-change watcher, which only fires when a dictionary file's contents actually change — meaning CHEMIST's word pool silently stayed empty for an entire bot session unless some unrelated dictionary file happened to get edited afterward, causing it to always fall back to PRO's long-word rule instead of playing real chemistry words. It is now also populated directly at startup, alongside every other category, so it works correctly from the moment the bot comes online.

Corrected for the record: the Sniper AI figures in this article (0.1% passive spawn, 20% via !snipe) are the actual values used by the game — an unrelated benchmark once suggested elsewhere (that !snipe itself succeeds only "1 in 100" of the time) does not match the code and is not reflected here.

Shortly after LARP AI launched, its webhook impersonation was confirmed not actually firing live: turn messages were showing up under the bot's own name and avatar with a plain "AI:" label instead of the impersonated member's identity. The underlying cause is a missing Manage Webhooks permission for the bot's role, which is required for any bot to send a message under another identity on Discord — that failure was previously being swallowed into a generic, easy-to-miss log line. It now logs an explicit, actionable message identifying the missing permission, and the non-impersonated fallback message was also changed to drop the "AI:" label entirely, consistent with LARP never naming itself even when impersonation can't fire.

Several game-management slash commands — including /invite_ai and /murder_ai — could previously fail outright with a generic Discord "Unknown interaction" error under load, because they could end up waiting on a lock (held by an in-flight AI turn, or, for /invite_ai, on LARP's own activation lookup) for longer than Discord's 3-second initial-response window. Both commands now acknowledge the interaction immediately and send their actual response afterward, removing the crash.

WITCH-DOCTOR was added later as a further single-category personality, drawing from the pre-existing Anatomy Physiology Pathology (APP) /dictionaries category — community-named after a Discord suggestion. Unlike CHEMIST, it carries no special exclusions of its own (no InChIKey-style filtering or equivalent), and unlike CHEMIST's original addition above, its backing word set was already reliably loaded both at startup and on every live refresh, so it didn't repeat that same wiring gap. Its spawn weight was freed up the same way as every other addition in this run: trimming another 1.5 percentage points off AVERAGE, leaving ASSASSIN's own weight untouched.

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.

LARP AI

LARP is the rarest personality in the game by deliberate design — exactly half the natural spawn weight of ASSASSIN (0.5% vs. 1.0%), a manual !larp success chance kept intentionally under 1%, and the longest cooldown of any personality command at 30 minutes. Unlike every other personality, which only changes which words get played, LARP changes who the AI appears to be.

On activation, LARP randomly selects a member from that server's Dictionary Completion leaderboard (the same top-10-by-unique-words pool and sort order /leaderboard category:completion uses, scoped to the current server only, never global), then plays only words that member has personally played in multiplayer Shiritori on that server. If the server has no completion-leaderboard history yet, or none of its top 10 players are currently resolvable as members, LARP cannot activate and a different personality is chosen in its place.

LARP is never named "LARP" or "Larping AI" in any player-visible message — turn announcements, personality-switch messages, and murder/assassinate confirmations all refer to it generically as "AI" instead. The one exception is the moment it first activates, when it posts a comedic reveal line naming the person it's impersonating, for example:

"Larpin- wait what thats not LARPING AI thats {name}?? no way theyre online?"

From that point on, LARP's turns are posted through a real Discord webhook using the impersonated member's live display name and avatar — genuinely impersonating them rather than merely labeling a message with their name. This requires the bot to hold the Manage Webhooks permission in that server or channel; without it, LARP's turns fall back to a plain, unlabeled message (no impersonation, and no "AI" label either) rather than breaking.

!assassin versus LARP AI

Because LARP's impersonation is "convincing," a successful !assassin roll (the normal 40% chance) does not instantly take control of an active LARP the way it does against every other personality. Instead:

• 1% mishap: Assassin AI is fooled completely and goes after the real person LARP is impersonating instead of LARP itself. That person is silenced for 500 valid words — the same mechanism as an ordinary failed-assassination penalty, just against an uninvolved bystander — and LARP itself is left completely untouched.
• 99% of the time: a chase begins. From then on, every AI turn opportunity is a fresh coin flip between ASSASSIN and LARP rather than the normal reroll logic, with each side's turn played under its own ordinary rules. Landing on the same side three times in a row ends the chase with ASSASSIN taking control outright; landing on LARP's side five times in a row instead ends it with LARP shaking Assassin off and continuing as before. Any turn for the other side resets a streak back to zero, so the sequence has to be genuinely consecutive.

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%
CHEMIST	35%	1 in 79,894,366	0.0000012517%
GEOLOGIST	40%	1 in 69,907,570	0.0000014305%
COLORPICKER	40%	1 in 69,907,570	0.0000014305%
MATHEMATICIAN	42%	1 in 66,578,638	0.0000015020%
DOCTRINAIRE	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
WITCH-DOCTOR	45%	1 in 62,140,062	0.0000016093%
LARP	0.5%	1 in 5,592,605,600	0.0000000179%

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