Eugene’s Bot Colony Blog | Bot Colony Home

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.