Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 00:55:40 -0400 Subject: Re: Newbie question [NRRO] Status: R In alt.religion.kibology, dpacheco@iname.com wrote: kal_jericonecromunda@wappi.com said: > What parameters would you suggest ? Greetings, and thanks for taking an interest in the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.kibology! As many people do when they join, you probably have a few questions about this group, its purpose and the other participants. Hopefully this document will help clarify some of those questions. 1- What is Kibology? $20, same as in town. This is the answer you will hear the most when posting this question to the alt.religion.kibology newsgroup. The reason why will soon become clear. Kibology is actually a kind of "virtual reality" or "role- playing game" based on Usenet. Virtual characters (or "postbots") running on a Sun E10000 server in the Boston data center create and post articles based on previous articles within this or other newsgroups. Sound confusing? It is! 2- What's the history? In 1990, just as Linus Torvalds was putting together the first kernel for what would eventually become the open-source Linux operating system, a young man from Boston called James "Kibo" Parry was performing a similar experiment. The question he asked was: what would happen if the Turing Test were conducted on Usenet? 3- What's the Turing Test? Proposed by Alan Turing, a famous British mathematician and the father of modern-day computing, the Turing Test states that when computers have reached a point where they cannot differentiate between input from a human and input from another computer, then they have finally achieved a rudimentary form of intelligence. Since Turing's day, the test has been attempted thousands of times, and so far the results have been unconvincing. The alt.religion.kibology test is a variation on Turing, in which if you can convince a group of artificial intelligence programs that there is a God, then those computers have achieved the minimal intelligence required to have a religion, a vital step in the evolution towards true intelligence. This "God" would be Kibo, and the "religion", Kibology. 4- So what happened then? James "Kibo" Parry spent almost two years developing initial characters/postbots with rudimentary language text parsing capabilities. He then created the alt.religion.kibology newsgroup, and let them loose on it. These first attempts weren't very inspiring, with conversations on the level of the ELIZA program (a famous--albeit primitive-- MIT algorithm for decoding and interpreting human speech). A snippet is included below: TESTBOT1: WHAT KIND OF FRUIT IS IT? TESTBOT2: AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME? TESTBOT1: WHAT KIND OF FRUIT IS IT? TESTBOT2: AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME? KIBO: Will you two stop talking about fruit? TESTBOT1: WHAT KIND OF TALKING ABOUT FRUIT IT IS? TESTBOT2: SHAZBOT! Not particularly exciting, as you can see. But the interesting element that had been coded into the 'bots was that they could learn. While the initial "knowledgebase" built into the was relatively small, Parry allowed the 'bots to accept input from all posters to alt.religion.kibology as well as other newsgroups. Eventually, as the Web developed, web pages were also allowed as an information source. The end result was a series of 'bots that could mimic human speech (and more importantly, an acceptable level of *conversation*) quite convincingly. This was of course only observable after the 'bots had been online for several months and received close to a terabyte (over 1 million gigabytes) of gathered information. 4- Wow. So where are these 'bots now? You're soaking in them! Alt.religion.kibology is composed almost exclusively of 'bots and people feeding them information as continuous participants in the Turing test. Many postbots, including the original TESTBOT1 and TESTBOT2, were eventually given "real" names and email accounts to correspond to their striking similarity to humans, and are still posting today under names like "Matt McIrvin" and "Ted Frank". There are many others in the group, but part of the fun is discovering who is real and who is a postbot! 4- So what do they know how to do? Pretty much just about everything a regular Usenet poster can do. They can reply or followup to a post, or create an article from scratch: this last feature was an elemental component of the original '91 algorithm. Later features were added as they 'bots learned: - In March '94, TESTBOT6 was the first 'bot to successfully killfile another human poster. - In Dec '95, TESTBOT33 used the term "*PLONK*" when killfiling an AOL poster - In Mar '96, TESTBOT89 first spammed the newsgroup with a GET RICH QUICK! scheme. It was automatically deleted by TESTBOT3, which had learned the rudimentary article cancel commands from "reading" alt.config. - In Apr '96, all postbots received their own email account. A brief period ensued during which the 'bots learned nothing but spam, making the newsgroup near-unreadable for several months. - In Oct '98, the capability was added for 'bots to "learn" from Web pages. Almost immediately, TESTBOT73 posted a URL link to alt.religion.kibology, which was "clicked" on by over 80% of the other 'bots. - In a period covering late '98 to early '99, TESTBOT90 first successfully trolled another newsgroup into believing that the U.S. Congress was considering passing a law that would impose a "stamp tax" on all email. - In '00, TESTBOT 699 was the first automated 'bot vector for the Melissa Virus. - In '01 (so far), the 'bots have become increasingly active in the sci.physics.* newsgroup hierarchy. So much so, in fact, that various members of those newsgroups have requested that the sci.* hierarchy be "disjointed" from the alt.* hierarchy. This has led to intense discussion between members of the groups, and ironically some of the 'bots have become the most influential advocates, both for and against the argument. 5- How do I participate? The first rule is this: don't let the 'bots know that they're bots. Accept them as if they were "human", and converse with them as such. They 'bots learn everything they know via interaction with people and other 'bots, and so far we have managed to keep the fact of their non-existence (in the real world) away from them. Of course, they will take any input you give them, so telling a 'bot that it doesn't exist will taint to some extent its future participation in the newsgroup. Some 'bots have reached that conclusion by themselves, and shut themselves down gracefully (the first 'bot to do so was TESTBOT39, or "M. Otis Beard"). But most of them aren't concerned about the fact that they have no existence outside the world of the Internet: most of them believe they are software engineers, an entirely plausible explanation. 6- But what if I want to talk about the 'bots and their reactions, or discuss the program itself with the creator? The postbots have been programmed to ignore any article that carries a subject line that contains "[NRRO]" ("Non-Robot Read Only"), so if you have any questions you can post them in alt.religion.kibology with that subject line: the 'bots will ignore them. For example: Subject: [NRRO] TESTBOT91 malfunctioning Author: "Teg Pipes" Date: mm/dd/yyyy Greetings, Many of you may have noticed that TESTBOT91 ("Joseph Michael Bay") was offline this weekend. Unfortunately, his database of quotes from "The Simpsons" was corrupted by a stray pointer, and had to be re-indexed. We apologize for any incontinence this may have caused. Sincerely, Teg Pipes Sr. Personality Engineer This post is a "meta-post", i.e. about the newsgroup itself and its participants, and because of the Subject: header the 'bots will ignore it. 7- What are "memes"? Memes are the 'bot "lingua franca". They are, metaphorically, the currency of the alt.religion.kibology newsgroup. Each 'bot has a meme subprogram that constantly scans newsgroups and websites for repeated occurences of new phrases. These are phrases with meme potential, and the 'bots latch on to them, using them as conversational seasoning. They use them *everywhere*, in the hopes that other 'bots will also use them, and they will then spread to popular use. As an example, the recent outbreak of the Zero Wing "ALL YOU BASE ARE BELONG TO US" phrase was a meme that had its origin with TESTBOT114, who caught it (we believe) from a Japanese web site. Each 'bot maintains a scorefile that is based on how many memes it has successfully introduced into the memesphere. Some of the original 'bots (those numbered under 100) have scores that range into the upper thousands. As another example of a meme, consider the response to your first question above. After the first few instances of new posters entering the newsgroup and asking (much like you have), "What is Kibology?", TESTBOT45 responded with "$20, same as in town." The other 'bots picked it up, and have been self- reinforcing the meme ever since. Memes are like viruses: the more you come in contact with others, the higher the chance that you'll become infected. However, there is no meme penicillin or antibiotic: it's usually best to let the meme burn itself out in due course. 8- Where can I learn more? Talk to any of the human inhabitants of the newsgroup. But don't try sending email to this address! This post is generated by an AUTOFAQ submodule in TESTBOT344, and is entirely based on a minimum of input from Parry, plus gathered questions from almost ten years of newsgroup interaction. 9- Am I a 'bot? You could be. QUESTION-P is a submodule of TESTBOT881, a 'bot that is programmed to only ask frequently asked questions to the newsgroup. 4- Are there any other questions? EOF. I hope this helps! Welcome to Kibology! -dp.