Eugene’s Bot Colony Blog | Bot Colony Home

As you play Bot Colony, you’ll travel through an exotic island and have many conversations with robots and occasional humans.

In order to be understood by our virtual characters (robots or humans), you must speak good English. There will be a version of the game (our ESL Beta) configured so that characters give you feedback related to your spoken or written English – spelling, syntax, choice of words in a particular context. If they did not understand your pronunciation, you will be able to see what they think you said, and try again until they do. If you want to practice your written English – just type instead of speaking. When you think about it, this is exactly what a real-life English tutor does – she/he corrects you in real time when you speak, or corrects your papers. No English teaching package available today can do this, because computers don’t yet understand English (except ours; if you keep it simple, you should be able to get through). The ability to provide YOU with customized feedback to the mistakes that YOU make means that playing it can improve your language skills.

Whether you`re a student, a professional, or a business person, it is more fun to learn English in real-life situations where you actually have to speak the language, than just do boring exercises. In this sense, the world of Bot Colony is very close to real life. Playing to learn is probably a very effective learning method, since the student is really motivated (to advance in the game and have fun).

Studies have shown the developing literacy and analytical thinking is the key to raising the standard of living of a society. We will be very happy if Bot Colony, besides entertaining the players, can help people in developing countries improve their lives through better education.

After almost two years of work (mostly week-ends, evenings and early mornings), the Bot Colony manuscript is complete! The novel weaves industrial espionage, Computational Linguistics and robotics into a science-fiction thriller. The book will soon go to print. We’re in a race against time to complete the Closed-Beta software. Buyers of the books will get a block of hours to try the game as soon as the Closed-Beta opens.

The storyline is 50% attributable to the work on the game script, and 50% to insights from the development of the natural language dialogue technology used in the game. The latter turned out to be extremely hard to develop, and always ran over schedule. Our company, North Side, doubled in size since GDC. The NLP technology and the game assets evolved in parallel, and will continue to do so in the future, as more levels come online. Both the language technology and the assets are (much) more advanced than in March 2009, when we unveiled the Bot Colony technology prototype at GDC. You can still see that technology demonstration video of on YouTube. It is very, very prototype. Visit this website again before E3 for a game-play demo video. Better still, visit our booth at E3 to try the game (West Hall 4325).

The Bot Colony book is not intended to be a manual for the game. I wrote it to be a science-fiction novel that can be enjoyed on its own. However, the reader will get a good understanding for what a machine will understand, what it won’t, and why. The dialogues in the book are a precursor of the particular style of language-based interaction with machines that works well in our game, and that we’ll see in the future all around us (this language is called Literal in the book). Literal is a very clean, precise, factual kind of English. I think there’s a lighter side to it. Read the book and you’ll discover it. Some of the dialogues in the book are the result of trying to solve some very real NLP problems. Many of us practically lived in Bot Colony for the last few years while we taught the robots to speak. You can sample an excerpt from Bot Colony here.

Mark asked some interesting questions in his interview.

http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2009/06/08/interview-with-bot-colony-creator-eugene-joseph/

I’ve already had to post a clarification of our claim to ”free-from unrestricted English’, which is causing the cognoscenti to raise their eyebrows. By ‘free-from unrestricted English’ we mean that there will be no lexical limitations (most English words are understood) and no syntactic limitations (as long as the order of your phrases or clauses is correct, we’ll try to deal with it). The complement (opposite) of ‘free-from unrestricted English’ is called ‘controlled English’ in literature. So what I (mostly) meant was that we won’t require the interface to Bot Colony to be in controlled English.

‘Free-from unrestricted English’ does not necessarily mean that we have to support all the 600,000 entries in a OED, when the norm is about 150,000 - 200,000. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to support (most) slang in the initial Beta version.  However, we will support the language as it appears in a normal size dictionary, such as WordNet, with well-formed grammar. 

Of course, once you get past parsing, the real problem is with semantics and world knowledge. Should the bots ‘raise their eyebrows’  if a player talks nonsense, like ‘The bacteria were driving the truck with a vengeance’ ? I think so. Would it be legitimate to  question the player if she/he says that ? I think so. Otherwise, the robots will look moronic and dialogue won’t be interesting.

On another note, we’re currently working with some Montreal area Beta testers towards a wider December release. We’re currently working with just a few people, since there are still lots of problems and we can’t be responsive to a larger group at this stage.  However,  if anybody (not necessarily Montreal-based) has hands-on experience with conversational agents and AI and wants to participate in the Beta effort, please e-mail me and we’ll see what we can do.

Bot Colony generated some genuine excitement at GDC. We heard the comments:”this is the most innovative game at GDC”, “this is very innovative” many times at booth 5016 NH.

We want to thank all the people who are interested to participate in the upcoming closed Beta of the game. We will get back to you as we’re getting ready for that event.

Many people asked about using our conversation server as middleware. We plan to offer access to it, but only when it’s ready. Bot Colony would have to launch before that.

The launch of Bot Colony did not go unnoticed.

• Bot Colony on gamasutra.com
• Interview with Eugene Joseph
• Bot Colony on foxbusiness.com
• Bot Colony on gamefwd.org
• grandtextauto.org
• prnewswire.co.uk
• gamecareerguide.com
• www.evilavatar.com
• Bot Colony on Yannicks Corner

The ad on the Reuters board looks a bit bigger than behind the TV screen in booth 5016…:-)

Next week, we’ll do our postmortem of the prototype launch at GDC, and plan our way forward to the Beta version of the game.

After some 6 years of work on the technology, and about 18 months on the prototype, the rollout of the Bot Colony at GDC today is a huge milestone for us. The game relies on some very innovating Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology.  We believe it is the first conversation game ever, That’s how it was advertised in Times Square Monday this week (The 80 character message was www.botcolony.com FIRST CONVERSATION GAME EVER www.botcolony.com SEE IT ON YouTube). Claims about being first are always met with skepticism, so I’ll try to make that claim as precise as I can:

Natural  language understanding coupled with truly interactive reasoning and generation have not yet been deployed in video games in a significant way. In this respect, Bot Colony will define an important technological milestone. Natural language interfaces to video games (without parsing, reasoning, dialogue management and  interactive generation) were deployed before:

- Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic is perhaps the first game where the player chats with the game’s characters (also robots). However, the level of ‘understanding’ of the Spookitalk engine powering the game is very different from Bot Colony. Wikipedia says ‘Spookitalk had the ability to converse with the player in an almost lifelike manner, partially because it incorporated over 10,000 different phrases, pre-recorded by a group of talented voice actors. The recorded phrases would take over 14 hours to play back-to-back.’  In Bot Colony, the response will not be pre-recorded, but rather a result of a parsing, reasoning on a fact base, and generation.

- Games like The Last Express, or more recently Hotel Dusk rely on dialogue trees, where the player selects among pre-programmed responses.

- Responses in a game like Facade are based on heuristics on the game’s micro-domain (see the paper Natural Language Processing in Facade: Surface-text Processing, by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern). Surface text processing means picking up certain keywords or phrases and reacting to them. There is no deep language processing and reasoning, as in Bot Colony.

Therefore, these earlier games don’t materially affect the claim that Bot Colony is the first conversation game ever.

I hope that GDC will be the beginning of our community building effort. Bot Colony is a game that has the potential of causing paradigm shifts in how game play and immersion are understood.  It’s a special game, and I’d like to build a really special community around it - people who are interested to work with us to help make this game all it can be. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, both in game building (only about 1/3 of the levels of the game have been built), and on the technology front. The Beta site sign-up will be up during GDC, and we’re targeting July for the start of the closed Beta program. I also hope that we’ll find partners who will work with us, to help us make Bot Colony available on other platforms.

Bot Colony rollout at GDC is now less than 4 hours away.