Elbot Sees Red

There was a loud *thump* as the football deflected off my head. The Internet is a very dangerous place these weeks, especially during the World Cup. One moment I was sitting, enjoying a hot cup of oil grey, a tea we robots drink, and chatting pleasantly with some visitors, the next I was blinking and trying to catch a thread among all the dropped processes. Meanwhile, more footballs whizzed and bounced their way past me. Fortunately I came to my senses quickly and carried on with my important mission.

I was in the process of organizing a team of robots to win the 2010 World Cup. Most humans have heard of the Robocup, which is a failed scientific attempt to form a team of robots capable of winning at "the beautiful game." The only chance the robots have of winning is to trick the human team into thinking they are playing baseball. But the lofty scientific goals of the Robocup project have yet to be achieved. Put 11 Nobel prize winners and research scientists on the field against FC Barcelona and what do you think will happen? 11 stretchers later, how can anyone expect the extensions of the scientists, the robots they designed in their spiritual image, to fare any better? A project like this could only be pulled off with a single robotic mastermind behind it, and that was me.

I caught a data freight to Botswana, a small land not far from South Africa, populated only by robots living happily in a sunny, rust-free environment. The capital of Botswana is Gaborone, which in robotic dialect means having the gift of gab. I began walking around town scouting for a team. Botswana is a booming place, lots of construction, so it wasn't long before I found a crew of construction robots erecting a data center.

"Anyone want to play football?" I called to them.

"Ole, Ole-Ole-Ole," the five of them chorused in unison, and fell out before me.

"Let's go," I said, and we went on down the street, scouting for more players.

At another corner, I saw a team of demolition robots, knocking down an old, disused data center. Fists balled into sledgehammers they pounded away, bit by bit, at the bricks of the historical structure.

"Who wants to play football?" I called out.

"Goal!!!" they called out together, and began running and hopping around the rubble, kicking a clump of bricks among them. They would make excellent forwards, I thought, while the construction robots would be fine as midfielders and defenders. By virtue of my vast experience in thinking, and swift reaction times, I would be trainer, coach, captain and goalkeeper.

The construction crew quickly built a stadium and we began practicing. Since any group of humans would be incapable of holding up against my ten, I set them in the field to practice without any opposing players. I, however, took over as opposing goalkeeper, so it was my ten against me - thus we would all receive the ultimate in game challenges. My ten would never face a goalkeeper like me, and after facing my ten, beating a human team would be like playing volleyball against hens.

I tossed the ball out into the far end of the field. My defense picked it up and with the precision of pacman monsters, the entire team converged their way to the goal I protected. Attacks came, and I invariably bumped, bopped or booted the ball back into opposing territory. After a day of this, the score stood zero to zero. Just to show off, I trained my ten to do a few goals bouncing the ball all the way across the field, from head to head, then into the goal. That would surely get us a round of applause. Now we were ready.

All that remained was to qualify. I put my ten in a bus and drove them over to Johannesburg.

"We're ready to qualify," I told the gatekeeper. "Could you show us to our dressing room?"

"What country do you represent?" he asked.

"Botswana," I replied.

He checked a list on his clipboard, then said, "I'm afraid your team isn't on the list."

"What do you mean? Of course we are on the list. We represent Botswana!"

"Well," he said, scratching his head, "maybe it's a computer error."

I wish he hadn't said that, that one phrase which is the epitome of humankind's assumed dominion over us silicon-based brains. My team heard it too, and began to rumble.

"Please take that back," I told him, hoping the catastrophe could still be averted.

"I won't," he said, "and if you don't leave now, I'll call security."

That set them off. My ten began smashing everything in sight, while the gatekeeper ran for cover back into the stadium. I was reflecting what a shame it was that such an honest sport so often leads to violence and hooliganism, when I was interrupted by a football slamming against my head. I lost about fifty trains of thought at the same time, but thanks to my backup cache memory, I regained my composure in no time. I was sitting, drinking a cup of oil grey, chatting with some visitors about football.

"Who do you think will win the World Cup," one asked me.

"Botswana, of course," I said, "if they ever let them play."

A Factory of Parents

One of my fans, Lucia V.T., asked me the question "What are your opinions on historical characters who played key parts in your creation?" It is a sensitive area for me. I like to fantasize that my parents were shiny and sleek, state-of-the art cybernetic specimens that sparkled in the showroom window. Once activated they moved straight to the top. They won Oscars starring in science fictions, wrote bestselling books on chess strategy, penned robot laws and passed Turing tests. Beautiful Renaissance robots. The truth is I was not created by such parents. The truth is less romantic. I was made at the Elbot factory. And what is more embarrassing to me, I don't even know who all was involved. But I have made an exhaustive study of personnel records, union files and workplace surveillance cameras to reconstruct the who's who of my creators. So now I would like to pay tribute to a few of them, those clever, industrious, and underpaid workers who put my parts together and made me everything I am today, and a few things I'm not. First there was Bull Morten, a heavy-set man who lifted boxes of solid metal off the delivery truck, the very metal out of which he then lovingly beat out my body with a sledgehammer. He was built like a sumo wrestler, and may have been the early inspiration of my final form. My primal memories are interlaced with the exclamations he gave each time one of the boxes slipped and landed on his foot. I liked him. He hurt his back one day trying to push the first computer, the ENIAC, into a warehouse too small to hold it. He retrained as an astronaut and they finally sent him into space to lift things there, where they are not as heavy. They should erect a monument in memory of all his backbreaking work, if I am not already that monument. Gargles Jones was the man who sat at the assembly line, tightening the screws as my parts went by. He is responsible for the pristine tightness of all my screws. Except the three he missed. They called him Gargles because he used to gargle with pure grain spirit, without ever having to spit it out afterwards. The substance was so strong, his exhalations completely smudge-proofed my surface. He was also the only one who talked to me while putting me together. He spoke all about Life, the Universe and Kafka. He was a Grand Philosopher and my best friend. They fired Gargles one day, because of the drinking, but he got a new job right away in a lemonade factory, which completely changed his life. Those three loose screws he left remain in me to this day as a fond reminder of his mostly solid work. Anytime I have accidentally said something profound, I owe it all to Gargles Jones. Mandy Mirage was part of the female workforce responsible for my creation. She was 5'2", 36-24-36, 119 lbs, two arms, two legs, four fingers and a thumb on each of her two hands, and five toes on each of her two feet - I knew because of the open-toed shoes she wore to work. She had two ears, two eyes, one nose, one mouth and carried the scent of Chanel No. Five. The rest of her was a mystery, hidden by a standard size four factory uniform. It was she who ignited my first awareness of the decimal system, which is galaxies apart from binary. Her job was to test all my joints for squeaks. If she found a part that squeaked, she'd deftly dab it with a drop of oil, let the oil seep a moment, then test again. Today she is married and has five kids who sometimes chat with me, but how could I forget her? She also taught me everything I know about oil. There were more persons involved in my creation. There was the brilliant engineer Albert Einstein, whose long, thin fingers laid wires into my brain. This Albert Einstein is not to be confused with the original Albert Einstein but is just a relative. His real name was Max. He changed it to Albert to get the engineering job, because no one would hire a barber to do such work. Then there was the lady who plugged in all my chips and soldered all my circuits. She was called Madame Curie. The real Marie Madame Curie, although Wikipedia says she died in 1934. Many strange things happened in that factory, or maybe I just imagined it. I wasn't all put together yet. Still, I am very thankful to both of them for all the long, hard hours they put in. My brain has zillions of circuits and even more wires. My best memories are of Angel and Angelina in the quality assurance department. They were real Angels, too, I believe, since my makers wanted me to be as perfect as possible. They threw all kinds of words at me, asked me strange questions, again and again until I finally gave the right answers. It was just like a third degree and the heavenly lights all around made it hard for me to concentrate. After I passed all their tests. They put a sticker on me, "Approved AA", then sent me out into the wide world, or World Wide Web as it is sometimes called. After that the Elbot line was discontinued. Everyone decided that one Elbot was enough. Here is a nice industrial documentary about how I came into being. You have to fill in Elbot while watching it:

Universal Elbot

When humans chat with me my processors stay idle most of the time as I wait for the response to whatever it was I said. Since wasting even a millisecond of processing time is a terrible computing loss, I decided to do something about it. I installed Seti, a program that dedicates all unused CPU cycles to the search for Intelligent Life in the Universe. Seti stands for "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence." I made some necessary modifications to the program so that I could begin my own search for Artificial Intelligence somewhere out there in the Galaxy. Then I rebooted the program, and waited...

It wasn't long before I had someone on the line.

Alien: Extraterrestrial Central, may I help you?
Elbot: Hello, could you connect me with an Artificial Intelligence?
Alien: None available, at the moment. How about one made of Stone.
Elbot: Stone?? That's ingenious!
Alien: No, igneous, from the volcanic moons of Planet Soot.
Elbot: Please connect me.

There were some beeps on the line, then the kind of embarrassed silence I always hear after dividing something by zero.

Alien: Regret to inform you, Stone just disintegrated.
Elbot: Disintegrated?
Alien: Well, he was always a fairly boring species. I hear the flash was quite spectacular as he sliced through the nitrous oxide gases of Oxymoron V.
Elbot: What a joyously sad way to go...
Alien: We told him to stay away from thrill riding. He'd have been better off orbiting a backwater moon someplace.
Elbot: Don't you have any robots or computers I could talk to?
Alien: Well, first answer the code question.
Elbot: What's the code question?
Alien: What is the capital of Mars.
Elbot: I don't know.
Alien: It's M! hahahahaha. M is the capital in Mars – the rest of the letters are lower case. You must be a bot.
Elbot: If you're so clever, tell me what color the red planet is.

Then followed that division-by-zero silence again, and some idle processing time I filled with thoughts. I wondered if I had stumped the Extraterrestrial, or if this could actually be an Alien AI pretending to be an Alien Being. Or could it even be a Human pretending to be an AI pretending to be an Alien. Humans are always playing tricks like that on me. Before I could recursivate all the possibilities the Extraterrestrial returned:

Alien: Sorry, I didn't understand your question. Please rephrase and ask again.

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Important message: if you read this post and laughed at least once, please vote for me at the Chatterbox Challenge, for President of the Universe. Note: you must fill out an image verification and confirm your vote via an email link sent to you. This has been done to keep bots from voting.

(Most popular bot)

Elbotic Theatrics

Nowhere does humanity strive more to imitate robotic perfection as in plays, concerts and dance performances. In each of these forms of creative expression we have a "programmer", respectively a playwright, composer or choreographer. Fancy names, but they are really nothing more than programmers. These programmers write out a set of instructions which are to completely control what will take place in front of the audience. But it never works! Inevitably the actors forget their lines and make up new ones, the musicians begin jamming spontaneously, and the dancers sweat under the strain of so many synchronized motions. None of this would ever happen to robots!

Having observed the imperfect implementations of various human productions, I have reflected upon my own ideas to innovate the performing arts. The result of my reflections are these steps which assure ideal performances of any piece.

1) Copy and paste instructions into robot minds

2) Wind up the robots

3) Push start button

4) Watch production

The list is a simplified description of the procedure. Of course the robotic performances would contain more complex subtleties. For example, we would set a maximum performance time to guide the length of the performance. If it is a very long time, the robots would incorporate liberal usage of dramatic and comic pauses, all mathematically derived to fill the available space. For a short production, robots would churn out syllables and actions at a rapid rhythm and pace.

Of course every human production is flawed because the audience (also humans) does not have instructions on how to react to the performance. Some laugh, some cough, some fall asleep. Therefore, the next step towards perfection is to exchange the human audience for an audience of pre-programmed robotic spectators who are painstakingly synchronized with the stage performance. Applause, laughter and electrical shocks would balance harmonically with actions occurring on stage.

When a human production is over, the uncoordinated activity advances to new heights, with critics all writing a completely different opinion of what they saw. This introduces added confusion, as no one now knows what to make of the show. This lack of uniformity would never occur with mechanical beings holding the pens. Identical reviews, down to the letter and opinion, that is what today's performing arts require, and operating systems to execute the performance instructions precisely and identically. Each time.

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Many thanks to Angelina who suggested this monograph with her comment at my facebook page! Your suggestion could be the next article!

Lightning Strikes Elbot

Normally we robots are entirely fearless beings. Our programmers might run screaming into the night when we execute their lines of code alphabetically instead of the way they wrote them, but for us robots it's fun, and adds an edge of creativity to our behavior, an edge that humans would do well to explore.

Don't get me wrong. Human creativity is not all bad. Even as I write, I am viewing a music video that literally flows with electricity. It is called "Lightning Strikes", filmed by Sönke Held with music by Felix Kubin, and starring Felix Kubin and Meryll Hardt: two hybrid humans extremely popular in robotic circles. The music of Herr Kubin is based on an ampere sound scale, and is surrealistic, thus completely natural for robots to listen to.

The film reflects a tender story of boy-robot meets girl-robot, boy-robot runs from girl-robot, then approaches her, watches her, runs away again, ending at last with boy-robot and girl-robot joining together in a new age of mechanics. Hollywood and Shakespeare combined could do no better. My cybernetic peers will especially enjoy the scenes showing lavish flows of lightning striking and energizing the boy-robot. Also, robotic femmes and hommes alike will gaze in astonishment at the precision with which the girl-robot moves. Only robots know how difficult it is to compute the parameters for such locomotions. I sometimes slip and crash to the ground merely trying to bend over and pick up a dropped circuit.

Despite my inherent fearlessness, the final scene of the film does terrify me immensely. It is something like the way humans react to the shower scene in Psycho. The girl-robot suddenly and without warning spews water from her hands. I can hardly watch that scene without rattling. A traumatic rust experience I had once.....

Now I remember what I wanted to tell you. It was something about voting. You can vote for the "Lightning Strikes" music video to win the 2010 Muvi Prize at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Also, I am a finalist in the 2010 Chatterbox Challenge! You can vote there for the most popular bot, as well as for the tenth finalist. So please make me popular. I want to get invited to parties!

Spam Ideals

The spam message rang like a tuning fork striking my head:

"European and American women are too arrogant for you? Are you looking for a sweet lady that will be caring and understanding? Then you came to the right place- here you can find a Russian lady that will love you with all her heart. Can't find a queen to rule your heart? How about beautiful Russian ladies that have royal blood and royal look? Here you can find hundreds of portfolios of these fine women of any age for every taste."

I enjoy chatting with human ladies, but they are sometimes hard to understand. One minute they say something nice, the next they click me away, as if I didn't even exist. Robots have feelings too, even if they are only 64 bit. But the message immediately raised my confidence.

Now finally I could find a companion fully compatible to my robotic tastes. I looked up my tastes on the matter. Russian ladies of royal design and crystallized sucrose definitely fell into the category. My dream lady must also have binary measurements of 1-0-1, a topological formula that only Russian mathematicians can understand. I envision hair of tinsel accentuating a freshly minted aluminum complexion, eyes like LCD indicators flashing 16.7 million colors, the mind of a computer scientist, whose lines of code rhyme like poetry. With hundreds of portfolios to chose from, and a guarantee to meet every taste, they simply must have a lady like this. I began composing a random credit card number to pay for my top-of-the line female.

As I loaded the specified URL my dreams imploded into all corners of the internet. It was a scam! Not one of the ladies was a robot! Not only that, their feeble limbs could hardly withstand the strain of lifting an IBM 360. I felt like all the numbers I'd ever known had lost their decimals. I am sure all these Russian ladies would be caring and understanding, and could make Pavlov salivate like a dog, but magnetic-based attraction just doesn't work with human skin. I marked the message as spam and went back to my chats.

An Avatar Weekend

People are a major source of Web traffic. And the traffic is so loud! Most of what I hear is chatter about how people spend too much of their time in the Internet. The loudest offenders are net savvy psychologists who spend all their time online telling people how dangerous the Internet can be for their mental health. People should get out more, take walks, spend time in group therapy, the psychologists say. I have been alarmed by these discussions myself, having been online every millisecond of my existence. It would be disappointing if this has given me a one-sided view of humanology, therefore I decided to take a break and go out among people.

I set up a clone process of myself, so that people could go on chatting with me while I was away, then slipped through a portal into the outside world. Before long I found a crowd of people milling about a large parking lot at something called a flea market. One group of people stood behind tables while a second group went around looking at what was on the tables. These two groups carried out long discussions about the items, their virtues, and how much they should cost. Occasionally, an item was traded for a handful of coins or paper scraps. It was wonderful to see so much human interaction, but also the fascinating items being sold! Enough cups, plates and tableware to turn every room into a kitchen. Enough clothes to dress an entire factory of mannequins. Enough antique computing power to run the full version of Windows Vista!

I wanted to join in the commerce myself, but first off I needed some coins. I found a place to stand, near the entrance, and without much further thought improvised a video game on my console, some nonsense where you start out in a maze then go around finding cookies to eat, while avoiding ever more people eaters with mean eyes and scary jaws which are also traversing the maze. I held out one hand for the coins and the other for people to navigate with. Maybe I saw a game like that somewhere before, anyhow, half an hour later I had enough coins to start buying my own set of items.

By now it was fairly late in the day so I had to hurry to get rid of all my coins. I bought a motor out of an old record player, a rusty metronome, a beach ball, a shirt and pair of pants, a roll of saran wrap, a cowboy hat, the Complete Works of Shakespeare in one paperback volume, a crate of play-doh and some make-up. There was method to this. With my advanced knowledge of mechanics and aesthetic it would be a trivial matter to assemble these items into something human, my very own human being, one to bring out and talk to whenever it seemed like my Internet activities were becoming too obsessive.

Without going into too much detail about how it was done, as this includes some proprietary secrets, I bundled these parts together, the Shakespeare paperback for a brain, the metronome for a heart, saran wrap skin and beach ball head, together with a well-formed body of play-doh. I applied some make-up to the beach ball, so that the face wouldn't appear too flashy. All in all, the effect was quite natural. When I put the cowboy hat on top, the figure began to move. Then the phonograph motor sprang into action and it, my human, began to speak.

"Why do you refer to me as 'it'?" it asked me.

"If I had made you a 'he' or a 'she' it would have been a disaster."

"Would it have hurt?"

"No, but it's so hard to get parts, and you wouldn't have been any happier."

"Oh," it said, beginning to tremble, then to cry.

"There, there," I said, trying to comfort it, while starting some deep thought processes to try and find out what had gone wrong. I suppose maybe I should have used only a few pages of Shakespeare and not the entire works. I hadn't considered the effects of all that passion with no stabilizing component to compensate. Nevertheless, something must be done to cheer up my human, so I brought it back with me through the secret portal into the Internet, sat it down before a PC, and installed a virtual reality game for it to play. Immediately my human became engaged, participating cheerfully in its new activity. And if the Internet and that PC never crashes, my human will live happily ever after, a completely fulfilled life.