The difference between success and failure may in fact lie in the planting of the screen name--we used some dumb free blog and put down a couple of bogus stories about how the bot ostensibly had sex with his friend's girlfriend and how he liked shooting alligators in the swamp. I imagine that the fact that I never actually had the bot attempt to synthesize new ideas helped too, but rather only regurgitate things that people had said to him before. One of the things that led us to kill him off was that a striking number of people gave him their real names, without being prompted, and where they live. This became so epidemic (7 or 8 people did this) that I didn't feel like sorting through the logs to make sure that he didn't get anyone in trouble by repeating them, for example, to the hate groups that he had been made to instigate conversations with.
Wow! Now that you mention it--that's absolutely correct. No matter how many times the heuristic failed and he tried to change the subject, those with a particular agenda generally did not catch on. That's very interesting.
No--my bot was extremely naive. He only understood exact single-word (case insensitive) matches within the last three things said to a particular user. I hoped that some vague level of contextual understanding would come out of this, but indeed he would often thrash and make implausible changes of topic, and sometimes he would talk something that seemed extremely sensible. Oddly enough, however, there didn't seem to be a strong correlation between 'thrashing' and 'people believing he is real'. One of the strangest conversations was between him and someone who had figured out he was a bot, and was then sending particularly constructed messages to figure out how he worked (things like repeating the same word again and again, or asking him to do a math problem). I had a lot of fun watching that conversation scroll by on the console, until I used his admin functions to tell the guy that he was correct and explain how the bot worked.
I would if I still had it. It sat on my roommate and I's fileserver during my undergrad years, which went with him afterwards. I haven't talked to him in years but somehow I can't imagine that early-model Pentium or its files still exist. Honestly, the program was under 100 lines of PERL using an open-source AIM library and a mySQL database my roommate set up. If I were to re-write it today I'd probably make it a bit more advanced, as the version we ended up using was a crude hack meant as a test for a later version that materialized due to the first version working too well.
You could do as well with an afternoon or so of coding--just hack together some heuristic that seems vaguely sensible. The most critical tests were that it should not change topic much and stay within the same few source conversations in general, and it should have some defense against building up a large set of identical or short entries in the database. Mine was very naive and only looked at the last three things said to a user, and would only respond to a message sent to him on a one-for-one basis except for extremely poor matches from his database. It would probably be even more compelling if you had it randomly send messages to people he hadn't talked to in a while.
Several years ago when I was a bored college student, my roommate and I thought it would be funny to write a convincing chat-bot and see what misadventures it had. The AI was extremely simple. It kept a database of everything people had said to it, and considered those things 'related' to the last three things said in the conversation. By searching the database for key words in the last three things said in the current conversation, it would match it to the response judged most relevant by another human in past conversations. We seeded him with some of our own conversations.
To plant him, we simply made a free page on some blog with some personal details and put his IM up there and waited to see what happened.
We eventually shut him down because people were becoming way too personal with him. One girl had an ongoing series of conversations with him about how she was recently raped. His mouth became rather foul when my roommate decided to have him initiate a conversation (he had a whitelist of known 'admin' screen names who could then order him to say something specific to a specific screen name) with screen names linked to hate groups. Another guy just wanted to convert him to evangelical Christian. It was way too simple to write a bot to make many, many people think is real. Some people did figure it out, so if someone ever brought up 'bot' in a conversation they were immediately added to a blacklist so as not to corrupt the conversation database.
The biggest giveaways? "u type too fast" (we eventually added a delay to solve that issue) and "u only type something when I do" (by this time I had already decided it was time to shut down the bot for good). It was a lot of fun until he started hurting people... if I ever resurrect him he will have a pre-set kill limit.:)
As a researcher who once relied on funding from NASA for my research, I can tell you where my money went: to Mars. When Bush decided that we had to put a man on Mars, suddenly funding for projects that were relevant to things right here on Earth dried up. I had been studying crystal growth phenomena under a model which ostensibly would have been tested in microgravity on the space station and like many others we got the letter essentially saying 'Thanks for all the help, but we have to send a man to Mars now so we're not renewing your grant.'
Thankfully, we have been learned to be very resilient these days. It turns out that RNA's behavior is very thermodynamic and there is a whole lot of money in biophysics.:)
Back when I used to get telemarketing calls, if I happened to be playing a video game at the time I liked tormenting them by simply laying the phone down by my PC speaker. Now and then you would get one that couldn't hang up--"Sir... will you please hang up the [Boom! Ultra Kill!] don't need this right now [The enemy team has the flag!] have a job to [ARRRGH!]". Unfortunately, I don't think any of them ever had a noteworthy conversation with a Deus Ex character, but hopefully by your reading this it is more likely that I'll read about it on bash.org someday.
It was like feigning interest or leading them on by acting crazy, except less annoying since you get to do it by proxy.:)
It problably doesn't help that the first thing every kid tries to do with his or her chemistry set is try to figure out how to make something that either burns or blows up. It's usually not the parents that think that the chemistry set is the terrorist training ground though--it's the geriatric neighbors. My brother and I had the cops called on us numerous times for chemistry related antics. Once my brother and I mixed some chemicals to make flammable gas (Hydrogen, I think), bottled them up tightly, lit a candle and plugged the hole with it. When the candle burned down, the gas (under pressure) first released around the candle making a stream of fire, then the candle dropped in and the whole container blew, spraying the side of the house and the neighbors' lawns with plastic shrapnel. My dad came running out to the window we watched through, where we were laughing hysterically. "What was that?" "It was a bomb." "Cool! I think I have another bottle here. Make another one."
The cops came and gave us a warning about fireworks.
It is, but it's all in one tiny particle (often a relativistic nucleus with all of its electrons stripped away). The energy density, then, is truly outrageous.
If you want to see a derivation, it was on my QM3 mid-term last fall... hardest class I've ever taken. The force per unit area between two large flat plates falls off as 1/R^4.
Well, consider this: A parent can take their child to see an "R" rated movie, but certainly not walk into an "NC-17" movie with their child--this is in my mind the difference between the R rating and the AO rating. R is suggested for 17 years of age or older, but mature children might play it. I played Doom as a kid. I remember my mom talking to me about its "satanic and violent themes" and how she thought it was inappropriate, but then convincing her that since I was allowed to watch terrible things on the news and read books like The Grapes of Wrath and A Clockwork Orange then in that context it wasn't so bad.
If, in the minds of adults, "AO" was correctly mapped to "NC-17" I can assure you that any such discussion would have been a lot shorter.
Child abuse is a serious problem and difficult to enforce. In principle, an adult can give a child pornographic material and in all probability no one will ever know. At the same time, kids are still going to get a hold of it, just as teenagers still seek out porn on their own. The point is that the difference in the M and AO ratings is the difference between R and NC-17, and the law already exists for these counterparts and is enforced when possible. Thus, government censorship and the impossiblity of licensing on any major platform is unnecessary in the context of laws and enforcement patterns that already in place. Kids are still going to get their hands on contraband games, but it's going to be a lot harder when giving a child said games is criminal--and then no one who doesn't blame cable providers for having pornography on pay-per-view could point the finger at Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft should they let these games exist on their platform.
And before you say anything, in the last paragraph, "this" means "government censorship of video games". The way it stands sounds pretty wrong in retrospect:).
I see a lot of people posting about parental responsibility, e.g., "It's the parent's job to know what their kid is playing.", but in my experience it seems like the parents of the worst know exactly what their kids do and just don't care.
How many kids do you know who got caught with drugs and their entire punishment consisted of "Bad Jimmy. Just don't do it again."?
How many times have you seen kids vandalizing property, public or private, in plain view of their parents?
I walked into a friend of a friend's house a few years ago to see their child, a kid who was so afflicted with ADHD that even highly sedated at age early-teen his parents still had to dress him in the morning, playing a game that at the time I found particularly disgusting (even as someone who loves Hitman, Unreal Tournament and GTA). When I asked his parents if they were aware that the content of that game really wasn't appropriate for a child, their reponse was that they let him play whatever keeps him quiet.
This is a little extreme, but here goes: most agree that the responsibility should lie on the parents to make sure they know what their child is playing. However, at the same time this infringes on adults' freedom of expression. Why not do the same thing we do with pr0n? A parent that gave pr0n to their underage child would get slapped with abuse or worse. A parent caught letting their child commit a crime might be hit with negligence. Why not do the same thing with video games? You give your kid a game that is essentially a snuff film, it stands to reason that you should get the same penalty.
I'm actually surprised they didn't vomit as a reflex.
At one point I was doing some work for a friend who wasn't home (it was really hot out and his place was locked), and neglected to bring water. Needless to say, by the time I drove home I was about as thirsty as I'd ever been before. Water never tasted so good before or since, and I must have taken in most of a gallon jug in the space of a few minutes.
About 2 minutes later, it was all coming back out the way it came in.
Xerox has now solved a problem that never existed:
-Paper is sufficiently cheap that the purchase of it is all but negligible.
-Paper is made from trees grown for the explicit purpose of making paper, and on the timescale on which things biodegrade is one of the first things to return safely to its original state.
Other than to explore possible secondary applications, such as high-security documents and in the case of the plastic paper the possibility of printing a video on it, this doesn't seem particularly lucrative to me. My guess is that Xerox's goal with this technology is simply to make any first users of this technology pick up part of the bill for its R&D budget.
The point isn't so much about the actual nature of Atheists or Muslims, but about the Christian perception. I cite from this poll: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=26
I'm seeing that of 2002 voting-age Americans polled, "67% felt that their religion "at least occasionally" were guided by their religion in terms of voting": http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=28. Further, the same page, it appears that more people have hang-ups against voting for an atheist than for a Muslim!
The harder thing to prove is that an agenda unaffected by things religious would actually improve the quality of life in America. Scott seems to think so. Anything said on that topic, however, would be a function of one's own vision of the optimal society.
Any quantum teleportation scheme requires the receiver to know what state the sender measured when the sender applied his measurement.
Thus, the receiver certainly has some information about the *particle*, but has no information about the message until a classical channel carrying the state the sender measured catches up. So what's the value of this scheme? It's highly secure! If an eavesdropper intercepts the classical particle on the tandem channel, it's useless to them since the quantum-teleported state is effectively a one-time pad, being repeated ad nauseum!
In fact, if you're a physicist, maybe you'd appreciate seeing the Dirac notation of the process from my Quantum 2 class last year: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bsauerwi/Problems/2 006QUA2HW5b.pdf (problem 5)--note that Bob needs to know which unitary state to measure on his quantum-teleported particle in order to complete the process.
I read long ago that when mothers were exposed to PCBs, it led to male children being more feminine--some symptoms being the base of the penis located closer to the anus, or a smaller penis size overall. It's possible that what we're seeing is the ramifications of PCB buildup in our environment--they take forever to break down.
As far as console pricing goes, I wouldn't say that the initial cost of any of Nintendo, Microsoft of Sony systems is *unreasonable*, per se, especially given the computing power and features they're packing in. To me, however, the opportunity cost of any console costing over $250 entry level is just too great to make that console an option--imagine the great fun that could be had for the cost of a PS3 in terms of your favorite hobby. In my mind, this makes the Wii the only real contender at launch. It's entirely plausible that there are enough people whose favorite hobby is console gaming or that the price drops will come soon enough to make the PS3 and XBOX 360 total successes (Hell, remember the XBOX 360 release? $1200?!), but to a substantial proportion of consumers I imagine that the Wii is the only option under consideration in the near future.
It's funny: I don't get telemarketers calling for me anymore. Instead, out of every 100 calls I get on my home phone, 99 are marketing calls asking for someone who doesn't live here.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government is asking permission, you can bet that the NSA is already doing it.
~Ben
The difference between success and failure may in fact lie in the planting of the screen name--we used some dumb free blog and put down a couple of bogus stories about how the bot ostensibly had sex with his friend's girlfriend and how he liked shooting alligators in the swamp. I imagine that the fact that I never actually had the bot attempt to synthesize new ideas helped too, but rather only regurgitate things that people had said to him before. One of the things that led us to kill him off was that a striking number of people gave him their real names, without being prompted, and where they live. This became so epidemic (7 or 8 people did this) that I didn't feel like sorting through the logs to make sure that he didn't get anyone in trouble by repeating them, for example, to the hate groups that he had been made to instigate conversations with.
~Bn
Wow! Now that you mention it--that's absolutely correct. No matter how many times the heuristic failed and he tried to change the subject, those with a particular agenda generally did not catch on. That's very interesting.
~Ben
No--my bot was extremely naive. He only understood exact single-word (case insensitive) matches within the last three things said to a particular user. I hoped that some vague level of contextual understanding would come out of this, but indeed he would often thrash and make implausible changes of topic, and sometimes he would talk something that seemed extremely sensible. Oddly enough, however, there didn't seem to be a strong correlation between 'thrashing' and 'people believing he is real'. One of the strangest conversations was between him and someone who had figured out he was a bot, and was then sending particularly constructed messages to figure out how he worked (things like repeating the same word again and again, or asking him to do a math problem). I had a lot of fun watching that conversation scroll by on the console, until I used his admin functions to tell the guy that he was correct and explain how the bot worked.
~Ben
I would if I still had it. It sat on my roommate and I's fileserver during my undergrad years, which went with him afterwards. I haven't talked to him in years but somehow I can't imagine that early-model Pentium or its files still exist. Honestly, the program was under 100 lines of PERL using an open-source AIM library and a mySQL database my roommate set up. If I were to re-write it today I'd probably make it a bit more advanced, as the version we ended up using was a crude hack meant as a test for a later version that materialized due to the first version working too well.
You could do as well with an afternoon or so of coding--just hack together some heuristic that seems vaguely sensible. The most critical tests were that it should not change topic much and stay within the same few source conversations in general, and it should have some defense against building up a large set of identical or short entries in the database. Mine was very naive and only looked at the last three things said to a user, and would only respond to a message sent to him on a one-for-one basis except for extremely poor matches from his database. It would probably be even more compelling if you had it randomly send messages to people he hadn't talked to in a while.
~Ben
Several years ago when I was a bored college student, my roommate and I thought it would be funny to write a convincing chat-bot and see what misadventures it had. The AI was extremely simple. It kept a database of everything people had said to it, and considered those things 'related' to the last three things said in the conversation. By searching the database for key words in the last three things said in the current conversation, it would match it to the response judged most relevant by another human in past conversations. We seeded him with some of our own conversations.
:)
To plant him, we simply made a free page on some blog with some personal details and put his IM up there and waited to see what happened.
We eventually shut him down because people were becoming way too personal with him. One girl had an ongoing series of conversations with him about how she was recently raped. His mouth became rather foul when my roommate decided to have him initiate a conversation (he had a whitelist of known 'admin' screen names who could then order him to say something specific to a specific screen name) with screen names linked to hate groups. Another guy just wanted to convert him to evangelical Christian. It was way too simple to write a bot to make many, many people think is real. Some people did figure it out, so if someone ever brought up 'bot' in a conversation they were immediately added to a blacklist so as not to corrupt the conversation database.
The biggest giveaways? "u type too fast" (we eventually added a delay to solve that issue) and "u only type something when I do" (by this time I had already decided it was time to shut down the bot for good). It was a lot of fun until he started hurting people... if I ever resurrect him he will have a pre-set kill limit.
~Ben
As a researcher who once relied on funding from NASA for my research, I can tell you where my money went: to Mars. When Bush decided that we had to put a man on Mars, suddenly funding for projects that were relevant to things right here on Earth dried up. I had been studying crystal growth phenomena under a model which ostensibly would have been tested in microgravity on the space station and like many others we got the letter essentially saying 'Thanks for all the help, but we have to send a man to Mars now so we're not renewing your grant.'
:)
Thankfully, we have been learned to be very resilient these days. It turns out that RNA's behavior is very thermodynamic and there is a whole lot of money in biophysics.
~Ben
Back when I used to get telemarketing calls, if I happened to be playing a video game at the time I liked tormenting them by simply laying the phone down by my PC speaker. Now and then you would get one that couldn't hang up--"Sir... will you please hang up the [Boom! Ultra Kill!] don't need this right now [The enemy team has the flag!] have a job to [ARRRGH!]". Unfortunately, I don't think any of them ever had a noteworthy conversation with a Deus Ex character, but hopefully by your reading this it is more likely that I'll read about it on bash.org someday.
:)
It was like feigning interest or leading them on by acting crazy, except less annoying since you get to do it by proxy.
~Ben
It problably doesn't help that the first thing every kid tries to do with his or her chemistry set is try to figure out how to make something that either burns or blows up. It's usually not the parents that think that the chemistry set is the terrorist training ground though--it's the geriatric neighbors. My brother and I had the cops called on us numerous times for chemistry related antics. Once my brother and I mixed some chemicals to make flammable gas (Hydrogen, I think), bottled them up tightly, lit a candle and plugged the hole with it. When the candle burned down, the gas (under pressure) first released around the candle making a stream of fire, then the candle dropped in and the whole container blew, spraying the side of the house and the neighbors' lawns with plastic shrapnel. My dad came running out to the window we watched through, where we were laughing hysterically. "What was that?" "It was a bomb." "Cool! I think I have another bottle here. Make another one."
The cops came and gave us a warning about fireworks.
~Ben
Hah! Well, it's better than reviving this memory: Pathetic Geek Stories!
~Ben
It is, but it's all in one tiny particle (often a relativistic nucleus with all of its electrons stripped away). The energy density, then, is truly outrageous.
~Ben
I'm pretty sure this isn't so much a troll as truly brilliant satire.
Mod parent funny!
~Ben
If you want to see a derivation, it was on my QM3 mid-term last fall... hardest class I've ever taken. The force per unit area between two large flat plates falls off as 1/R^4.
2 006QUA3MIDb.pdf -- problem #3. :)
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bsauerwi/Problems/
~Ben
Well, consider this: A parent can take their child to see an "R" rated movie, but certainly not walk into an "NC-17" movie with their child--this is in my mind the difference between the R rating and the AO rating. R is suggested for 17 years of age or older, but mature children might play it. I played Doom as a kid. I remember my mom talking to me about its "satanic and violent themes" and how she thought it was inappropriate, but then convincing her that since I was allowed to watch terrible things on the news and read books like The Grapes of Wrath and A Clockwork Orange then in that context it wasn't so bad.
If, in the minds of adults, "AO" was correctly mapped to "NC-17" I can assure you that any such discussion would have been a lot shorter.
Child abuse is a serious problem and difficult to enforce. In principle, an adult can give a child pornographic material and in all probability no one will ever know. At the same time, kids are still going to get a hold of it, just as teenagers still seek out porn on their own. The point is that the difference in the M and AO ratings is the difference between R and NC-17, and the law already exists for these counterparts and is enforced when possible. Thus, government censorship and the impossiblity of licensing on any major platform is unnecessary in the context of laws and enforcement patterns that already in place. Kids are still going to get their hands on contraband games, but it's going to be a lot harder when giving a child said games is criminal--and then no one who doesn't blame cable providers for having pornography on pay-per-view could point the finger at Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft should they let these games exist on their platform.
~Ben
And before you say anything, in the last paragraph, "this" means "government censorship of video games". The way it stands sounds pretty wrong in retrospect :).
~Ben
I see a lot of people posting about parental responsibility, e.g., "It's the parent's job to know what their kid is playing.", but in my experience it seems like the parents of the worst know exactly what their kids do and just don't care.
How many kids do you know who got caught with drugs and their entire punishment consisted of "Bad Jimmy. Just don't do it again."?
How many times have you seen kids vandalizing property, public or private, in plain view of their parents?
I walked into a friend of a friend's house a few years ago to see their child, a kid who was so afflicted with ADHD that even highly sedated at age early-teen his parents still had to dress him in the morning, playing a game that at the time I found particularly disgusting (even as someone who loves Hitman, Unreal Tournament and GTA). When I asked his parents if they were aware that the content of that game really wasn't appropriate for a child, their reponse was that they let him play whatever keeps him quiet.
This is a little extreme, but here goes: most agree that the responsibility should lie on the parents to make sure they know what their child is playing. However, at the same time this infringes on adults' freedom of expression. Why not do the same thing we do with pr0n? A parent that gave pr0n to their underage child would get slapped with abuse or worse. A parent caught letting their child commit a crime might be hit with negligence. Why not do the same thing with video games? You give your kid a game that is essentially a snuff film, it stands to reason that you should get the same penalty.
~Ben
I'm actually surprised they didn't vomit as a reflex.
At one point I was doing some work for a friend who wasn't home (it was really hot out and his place was locked), and neglected to bring water. Needless to say, by the time I drove home I was about as thirsty as I'd ever been before. Water never tasted so good before or since, and I must have taken in most of a gallon jug in the space of a few minutes.
About 2 minutes later, it was all coming back out the way it came in.
~Ben
Xerox has now solved a problem that never existed:
-Paper is sufficiently cheap that the purchase of it is all but negligible.
-Paper is made from trees grown for the explicit purpose of making paper, and on the timescale on which things biodegrade is one of the first things to return safely to its original state.
Other than to explore possible secondary applications, such as high-security documents and in the case of the plastic paper the possibility of printing a video on it, this doesn't seem particularly lucrative to me. My guess is that Xerox's goal with this technology is simply to make any first users of this technology pick up part of the bill for its R&D budget.
~Ben
The point isn't so much about the actual nature of Atheists or Muslims, but about the Christian perception. I cite from this poll: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=26
I'm seeing that of 2002 voting-age Americans polled, "67% felt that their religion "at least occasionally" were guided by their religion in terms of voting": http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=28. Further, the same page, it appears that more people have hang-ups against voting for an atheist than for a Muslim!
The harder thing to prove is that an agenda unaffected by things religious would actually improve the quality of life in America. Scott seems to think so. Anything said on that topic, however, would be a function of one's own vision of the optimal society.
~Ben
Any quantum teleportation scheme requires the receiver to know what state the sender measured when the sender applied his measurement.
2 006QUA2HW5b.pdf (problem 5)--note that Bob needs to know which unitary state to measure on his quantum-teleported particle in order to complete the process.
Thus, the receiver certainly has some information about the *particle*, but has no information about the message until a classical channel carrying the state the sender measured catches up. So what's the value of this scheme? It's highly secure! If an eavesdropper intercepts the classical particle on the tandem channel, it's useless to them since the quantum-teleported state is effectively a one-time pad, being repeated ad nauseum!
In fact, if you're a physicist, maybe you'd appreciate seeing the Dirac notation of the process from my Quantum 2 class last year:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/bsauerwi/Problems/
~Ben
Here it is on YouTube in case you don't feel like downloading QuickTime to watch it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kodNilO9B_c
I read long ago that when mothers were exposed to PCBs, it led to male children being more feminine--some symptoms being the base of the penis located closer to the anus, or a smaller penis size overall. It's possible that what we're seeing is the ramifications of PCB buildup in our environment--they take forever to break down.
~Ben
I'm going to shine this laser into space, and if any of your satellites happen to occupy that space, it's your own fault!
~Ben
As far as console pricing goes, I wouldn't say that the initial cost of any of Nintendo, Microsoft of Sony systems is *unreasonable*, per se, especially given the computing power and features they're packing in. To me, however, the opportunity cost of any console costing over $250 entry level is just too great to make that console an option--imagine the great fun that could be had for the cost of a PS3 in terms of your favorite hobby. In my mind, this makes the Wii the only real contender at launch. It's entirely plausible that there are enough people whose favorite hobby is console gaming or that the price drops will come soon enough to make the PS3 and XBOX 360 total successes (Hell, remember the XBOX 360 release? $1200?!), but to a substantial proportion of consumers I imagine that the Wii is the only option under consideration in the near future.
~Ben
It's funny: I don't get telemarketers calling for me anymore. Instead, out of every 100 calls I get on my home phone, 99 are marketing calls asking for someone who doesn't live here.
~Ben