A Parade of Bots
For instance, I was in this online environment one time, and I kept hearing about this character named Dr. Sherry. Well, this Dr. Sherry administered questionnaires. Dr. Sherry interviewed people about their lives in this online environment-but I wasn't Dr. Sherry.
However, many people assumed, not unreasonably, that I was this person. I didn't know what to do. So I began looking into the activities of Dr. Sherry, and I found that she was in this online environment all the time. Dr. Sherry would be there at 3 a.m.; she would be there at 6 a.m., and she would be there at 5 p.m.
It finally dawned on me that this person might not be a person at all. She might be a bot that was programmed to interview people about their online experiences. It was an astounding moment: I meet my double and it could be an artificial being.
So I think that bots are a wake up call that we're getting to the point where some of the entities we interact with online may in fact be machines. It makes us reflect on what it is to be intelligent and what it is to be alive.
From an interview with Sherry Turkle, reprinted with permission
from E-Business January 1997 edition (find it online at: http://hpcc920.external.hp.com/Ebusiness/january/main1.html)
Bots, bots, bots, they are popping up everywhere. In the Jetsons
cartoons of our youth (or at least mine) there were all sorts
of helper robots. They would serve you dinner, drive you places,
and carry your bad news to the boss. Well, it turned out that
the household robot was a little bit harder to build than everyone
thought. But don't be blue, for the bots are finally here for
you! A bot is like an avatar, except that no person inhabits
it, just a piece of automated software. It may come as no surprise
that bots have been living in computers in various forms for a
long time.
Agents, much touted ancestors of bots
Back in the early days of Unix and the Internet, tiny pieces of
software called daemons were created to do a lot of nasty
little background tasks, like killing off errant programs, and
bouncing mis-addressed email. In recent years, there has been
a lot of attention focused on intelligent agents, or software
with a little more personality and brains than daemons. Proponents
are really convinced that intelligent agents will become the
universal tools to simplify our ever more complex lives. Agents
will do all your bill paying, help our kids with their homework
and even book our funerals and manage our living trusts when we
die. The Pharaoh's dream of immortality will come true as our
agent successors accumulate enough wealth to clone us anew, say
the agent backers!
The Internet is full of bugs!
Agent evangelists tell us that the era of the agent is already
here. They point to the Internet and say that it is crawling with
them: "spiders" or "webcrawlers" are constantly
visiting Web pages and gobbling up juice tidbits we may want to
search for later on. "Search agent: crawl my website!"
is a cry heard across the net by people desperate for more visitors
to their beloved home pages. Someone once told me that there are
more species of beetles than just about anything else and that
we should rightly call this the age of the beetle. It turns
out that a great proportion of the 'hits' or visits to home pages
are actually search agents. With the new angent-centric Java language,
more agents are on their way to make the Internet an even more
complicated place. Who knows, there may be a need for agent hunters
to cull the teaming agent population.
There is a bot in your virtual community
Agents long ago became a part of the furniture in virtual communities.
In fact, it was inside chat based communities built using IRC
(Internet Relay Chat) and MUDs (Multi-User Domains) that the word
bot was first used to describe a software agent that interacts
with the citizens of a virtual community.
There are some great taxonomies of bots on the net. If you want
to investigate further, check out the Bot Spot at: http://www.botspot.com/.
In addition, bot historian Kenneth Lonseth developed this comprehensive
description and links page about all the various species of bots
at: http://www.mindspring.com/~lonseth/alife/bots/bots.htm.
Ken has kindly agreed to describe for us his view of bots bots
and chatterbots including the famous great ancestor bot Eliza:
Bots are software programs that reside on the net responding
to communications protocols and users. Some perform maintenance
tasks and gather information, while others are meant to disrupt
online communications or just be plain annoying.
The first acknowledged bot was Eliza, made by MIT professor
Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid 60s. Eliza is a psychotherapist of
sorts, annoyingly dodging questions with questions of her own.
Eliza is also the first chatterbot: a bot meant to interact with
humans. She looks for certain key words and responds according
to her programmed algorithm. Eliza is painfully simple compared
to modern chatterbots, and her limitations are quickly revealed
during a short dialog. These days it's common that chatterbots
employ a host of "tricks" to help simulate human responses.
They also store conversations to build up databases for future
use.
An actual rendition of Eliza can be downloaded and talked to at
the Simon Laven Page: http://www.student.toplinks.com/hp/sjlaven/eliza.htm.
Ken goes on to describe thriving ecosystem of bots in MUDs and
IRC:
MUDs are considered the first breeding ground for bots. Online
multi user games are sprinkled with automated scripts designed
to respond to user interaction. In the late 80s Michael Mauldin
created the Mass-Neotek bots for TinyMUD at Carnegie Mellon University.
These bots can register who are present, and make sure the users
are abiding by MUDs rules. Newt is a bot of the Maas-Neotek family
and resides within DragonMud. Newt can relay messages and keep
track of your E-mail and homepage. He also tracks all players
and objects within the MUD and can record all conversations up
to a set memory limit. Most MUD bots or "mobiles" are
not as sophisticated as Newt. They are just simple scripts designed
to react when a user enters a certain area.
Multi user domains are not considered a vibrant ecosystem for
bots because of the many flavors of MUDs. With MOOs, MUCs, and
MUSHes the bots are confined to separate corners of the Internet
universe, each programmed on a different variety of language.
IRC has the most thriving online bot community. With thousands of different people interacting, clashing and chatting its no wonder bots are deployed into the pool in drones. Most bots are made to hold ops on a channel or guard against hostile takeovers. There is an ongoing war between hostile bot users and channel operators. Of a less violent nature are the variety of gamebots and chatterbots that offer a little challenge and simple interaction. #Riskybus is a gamebot that gives Jeopardy style questions to users. It keeps the score of all users and even has some chat abilities.
Eggdrop is one of the most powerful and long lasting bots on
IRC. It has many advanced features that help you protect a channel
or even save it for you while logged off. Eggdrop has also the
ability to link to other bots to form a pseudo-IRC called Botnets.
The Botnet development has spurred a new line of "Limbo Bots"
that never join IRC but only connect to Botnets.
Bots are banned from most servers because they are generally
a nuisance. In most cases unauthorized bot deployment will get
you K-lined or kicked off the server.
IRC bots live a firefly existence, with continuos changes.
Most don't last for more than a few weeks. Entire generations
are wiped out with new IRC server upgrades, and when bot rules
of conduct are introduced.
They're here..
Emerging from the agents craze and the bot ecologies we should
see some pretty interesting bots walking around in our local virtual
worlds. I personally hope we get bots as smart as the house robots
on the Jetsons. In fact, bots are already appearing in avatar
Cyberspace even as you read this! Lets meet one of the first of
these nefarious characters.. Floops.
Floops is a creation of Protozoa (http://www.protozoa.com).
He was created to star in a string of regular short performances
at the big Silicon Graphics VRML website http://vrml.sgi.com.
Floops has quite lifelike body moves and a great voice-over act.
Floops is a bot with a human personality. His gestures were made
by capturing a real actor's motions in a body suit. This is called
motion capture and is used in many Hollywood films to make
synthetic actors around in believable fashion. All of this is
called performance or character animation and seeks
to achieve what the experts are calling suspension of disbelief.
Your disbelief has been suspended if just for an instant you
forget that you are just looking at computer models and start
to immerse yourself in the story unfolding on the screen.
Protozoa has a fascinating history on their own. Using their custom
built ALIVE! animation software, they created the Moxy
character, a virtual host for the Cartoon Network. Short scenes
starring Moxy would be created every week so that he always had
fresh shtick to serve to the masses of cartoonaholics. An actor
in a body suit would walk Moxy around an do his gestures while
a comedian would read Moxy's lines. Moxy's scenes would be made
in real time driven by these performance artists and ready to
go on the air within minutes. See more about Moxy and Protozoa's
other projects at: http://www.protozoa.com/alive/index.html.
There seems to be no reason why the nightly news couldn't be presented
to us by some future Floops. With the voice processing and lip
synchronization from Onlive Traveler, a good VRML toolkit any
ten year old wired genius with a PC, microphone and modem could
run their own TV network. Hey, why wait for years to see video
through the Internet?
Episodic Avactors
Lets take a closer look at Floops. Floops stars in one to two
minute episodes produced twice a week. This reminds me of those
film shorts from about a century ago, which were all about one
to eight minutes long. It is hard for us to believe now that people
would line up at a nickelodeon box just to peer in and see a three
minute film loop. It will amuse our kids when they picture us
sitting on our 28.8K BPS modems, waiting for a half hour to 'experience'
a VRML episodic cartoon. But hey, you have to start somewhere.
Figure 13.2.1: floopsp1.jpg
Floops says: click on that dish!
Here we can see Floops after we started the episode. He is watching
us through the tube of our computer display, gesticulating for
us to "do something". Floops comes with his own voice,
as recorded by a voice-over artist and replayed in time with Floops'
body moves. The Floops follies are a little interactive in that
you can click on things and Floops will notice. Floops is desperately
trying to get us to click on the dish on his right.
Figure 13.2.2: floopsp2.jpg
Bingo! You get a fish!
If we finally click on the dish and a fish is ejected into the
air and swims (or flies) off. End of episode. Was it worth the
three minute wait for the download? Maybe. Bot performance worlds
like Floops or Atomic 3D's Neutron (see the chapter Brave New
Worlds) will get better and better when the models of the characters
can be downloaded only once and the only thing that will need
to stream in will be their gestures and voices. You could download
all the props, avatars and sequences of body moves to begin with
and then every episode will take less time to start playing. This
is how Active Worlds and many of the other virtual worlds work
today and part of the reason we have avatar Cyberspace years before
everyone thought it would be possible. Of course more interaction
with the bots in episodes should make them more interesting and
less like the familiar old couch potato 'push it down my throat'
TV.
Find more VRML episodic cartoons try out Mediadome's Driftwood
at: http://www.mediadome.com/Webisodes/Protozoa/Fun/.
Bots, coming to a world near you
Of course, we have yet to see something as sophisticated and well
crafted as Floops inside an inhabited virtual world interacting
with real people. But bots are already making their appearance.
Most worlds already have simple agents or daemons, like the building
inspector in AlphaWorld, that watches to make sure you are not
encroaching on someone else's property. Way back in the summer
of 1995 a hacker calling himself Cure95 inserted two bots into
Worlds Chat. This fascinating event is described in section called
A Brief History of Worlds Chat in the chapter on Worlds Chat earlier
in this book.
Black Sun introduced bots into Passport in the spring of 1997.
You can see one described in the section The Mysterious Mysterio
in the Black Sun Passport chapter. Bots in the Palace have been
seen sporting a Star Trek "Borg" eyepiece. I have often
wondered whether or not bots should tell avatars that they are
not people. I know that bots running in text-based MOO communities
have carried on conversations with people for hours, convincing
them that they were other users.
This all harkens back to the Eliza program described earlier in
this chapter and the famous 'Turing Test' of machine intelligence
devised in the Forties. It is all pretty silly when you get right
down to it, but people seem to thrive on tricking each other.
It seems to me that a good way to indicate that an avatar is actually
a bot would be to give it something like a Borg eyepiece, say,
a monocle. If the avatar is not human-looking, you could still
find a place to hang the monocle and its chain. If perchance the
bot was temporarily being driven by a person, the monocle could
be temporarily placed in the bot's shirt pocket. I guess you might
think I am sounding terrible old fashioned, prudish or even Victorian.
It just so happens I was born in Victoria (B.C. Canada, that is)
so I guess I am thereby entitled to this. I just want to know
who (or what) I am talking to!
Why do we need bots?
In an otherwise empty, lonely virtual space, a bot can be a great
trigger for conversation and can hold new users just long enough
for others to be attracted in. Onlive implemented bots to do just
this in their ABC Monday Night Football world. Here, the "tackle
dummies" were bots that would play audio files when you got
near them. These audio attention getters would usually be a sports
trivia question related to the football game happening on TV at
the same time (and streaming into the world). You could then try
to answer the questions.
Good "welcome" or "greeter" bots should give
newly arrived users a sense of belonging and a feeling of being
included. These avatar citizens are more likely to stay longer
and return in areas where they are not accosted by pushy "salesbots".
I played a bartender named Odiyah in the Low Earth Orbit station
in the MUD called SolSys Sim for a while, and so can appreciate
well designed "cybartender" bots found in worlds like
Onlive Traveler and Extempo's Spence's Bar (see the section Other
Worlds on the Horizon in the Chapter on Brave New Worlds).
Of course, bots could do other jobs inside virtual worlds. One
idea I have had for a while is for a community service bot that
could roam the giant AlphaWorld cityscape looking for "parking
lots". Parking lots are big pieces of virtual land covered
over by some overzealous citizen who then does nothing with all
that acreage. These bots could identify this gratuitously grabbed
land, determine who the neighbors are, call a hearing on the land
and then auction it off to citizens willing to do something creative
with it.