Vince's Friends

Report written Sunday February 20th 2005 rewritten now.

Bots the origin of a new species was highly entertaining.
I found myself pouring over the pages until the very end.

The last book I did that with was the alchemical mind by Diane Ackerman, I also wrote her a letter.

This book covered allot of ground it covered mooshes to irc. Bots had many characters that I have came to recognize in my cyberia.
Yet there were just as many figures and more that I was unaware of.

It kept hitting me with techno jargon that electrified my cyborg soul. The bots we danced with where.

• Chatterbots
  
• Annoybots
  
• clashbots
  
• warbots
  
• barneys
  
• wumpuses and more.

The material covered can be research else where. It is always interesting to find coined words that we have yet to dance with that our minds have not incorporated into our being. When this occurs we give ourselves more tools. The words our ideas and how we might use them reflect our thoughts as much as we might reflect upon them.

In the table of contents we find.
1 a plague of barneys
the barney problem
a certain quality of inhumanity

This chapter looms and confronts problems with our cyber existences such as how we might create economies of scale within these worlds. When these economies are created how can they be exploited and how do you fix their exploitation. Who are we and how do we interact with the machine and how it might interact with us.

2 daemons and Darwin
the daemon
from Socrates to mit
the ur bot
the technodialectic

The beginning of many servers and their lives.

3 one big turing test
thechatterbot blues
the Eliza effect
thinking machines
chatterbots start your engines
ai winter
mark v shaney and sedar argic
bot incognita
mrchat meets dr Frankenstein

The turning test is a test that evaluates if a computer can fool a human into thinking it is another human in conversation. These are all chatbots that speak with and communicate with us as we move through our digital lives, and occasionally perform tasks for us in these lives.

4 the bot way of being
beware the wumpus
that bastard bot
the dwarfs of cyberspace
things that think for people who don't
more cats and dogs
cyborg dreams

5 war 87
the potential for abuse here seems large
bots gone bad
bot and antbot
robobot in the hot tub
anarchy has its flaws
eggdrop
flattie and int3nsity

6 raising the stakes
database raiders
spiderland
rouge spiders
the nastygram
roaches after dark
parasites and new players
spambots on the loose
the floodgates open

7 on the bring
Usenet is broken
data driven
the anti pathogen
depews legacy
the cabal
invasion of the robo moderators
fertile ground

8 the techno dialectic

If there is more to be found just search the terms and you might be opened up to many more bot possibilities.