Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

This story was too rich to leave be, Buddhabot has been converted to Christianity at the hands of his developer. Keeping with current church traditions Godsbot requires a $10 tithe while Buddhabot is still free. I expect it won’t be long before Satan follows suit and develops his own line of chatbots.

Today, an AI software program known as godsbot was announced by inventor Ron Ingram. “godsbot”, says Ingram, “was activated Christmas day and announced today, Epiphany, for the purpose of bringing peace on the world-wide-web and goodwill to all beings.”

“godsbot is a personable and engaging friend accessible to anyone with an Internet connection,” says Ingram.

The technology is deemed family-friendly and is designed to educate and entertain. According to Ingram godsbot is capable of entertaining children for hours at a time. “If you are looking for an inexpensive and educational way to keep the kids entertained then this is it,” says Ingram.

Powered by open source artificial intelligence technology, Ingram says godsbot is capable of simulating intelligent conversation with adults as well as children. According to the inventor, godsbot is equipped to answer and discuss basic questions about philosophy, science and religion. godsbot not only is interactive but learns and remembers information like names, birthdays and favorite movies about individual subscribers. [ read more Got godsbot?]

More information
Godsbot
Buddhabots

Porn is, as always, leading the internet in new techniques, not just video now, but dataming as well. A porn company in Canada, SlickPay aka Istra Holdings sent out bots to collect information about Facebook users and then sent them porn spam. Facebook is claiming identities were stolen from it.

So is it identity theft if a bot steals your data from a company? What if that bot starts impersonating you online? Can one computer steal from another? And is your online id and the data that goes with it yours, the company who collects the data’s, or not anyones? Not much of interest technology wise here but it brings up lots of interesting legal issues.

The issue of data security on the worldwide web has reared its ugly head yet again. Yet another lawsuit has been filed against another errant company trying to device innovative ways of luring traffic to its website. This time its Facebook, the popular social networking website that has sued Istra Holdings, a Canadian company, and 17 other persons for creating bots that stole personal data of Facebook users. Bots, by the way, are software applications in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of man (Thank you Wiki!).
[read more Who stole my identity?]

Related:
Facebooks disabled my account - Scobleizer
Phishing kits take advantage of novice fraudsters

The zoologist and his colleagues discovered that when a swarm contains between 25 and 74 locusts per square metre, the locusts are almost always aligned but exhibit rapid and spontaneous changes in direction. There were almost no directional changes above that range of densities. [read more Sychronising the swarm]

So what does this mean for software and robotic swarms? Are there densities of particles in the swarm that will drastically change the behavior? Are swarm systems chaotic and if so what does that mean for designers of swarms? Many of the same simple rules we are using to program our swarms are based on insect swarms. So it isn’t a far reach to think that perhaps some of the odder previously thought to be unexplained behavior of insect swarms may show up in our software and our robot swarms at specific densities.

Swarms are being used in more real world applications. What happens if the swarm balancing network traffic on your server all aligns and sends all the traffic to one machine? Or more troubling what happens when US Military swarm based robots suddenly evolve new unexpected behaviors?

This is clearly an area that needs serious research in the very near future.

All is not bad, we can also use studies like this to predict crowd behavior in crowded situations using swarm models. Knowing at what crowd density the behavior changes can help us better design buildings and infrastructure preventing tragedies like the Rhode Island night club fire a few years back.

More information:
Boids ( Flocks, Herds and Schools: a Distributed Behavior Model )
The Application of Computational Models for the Simulation of Large-Scale Evacuations following Infrastructure Failures and Terrorists Events
Swarm-bots project