the bytes

After reading an article about AOL “Smart Bots”, a bot that tries to have a conversation with you. Based on your responses, this bot will continue to have an “intelligent” conversation and try to lure to into providing a credit card to log into a website and view “web cam” “videos”. Well, after reading the article, I realized that I get these obnoxious instant messages from multiple weird names that I have never heard of and they all have one thing in common; pink text, all lower case, and they always say “hey you”. I decided to finally have a conversation with one…. this is what I got in return…

(18:55:21) xoxbabiigiirloxx: hey you

(18:55:30) Me: hi bot

(18:55:44) xoxbabiigiirloxx: hi….. sorry if l bothered you, i was just bored wannna taIk??

(18:55:57) Me: i dont like talking to a computer…

(18:56:26) xoxbabiigiirloxx: niice, i was so lonely it’s nice to have someone to im with, soo whatcha doin tonite?

(18:57:12) Me: wow.. was it that easy to break your cycle? I thought you were a smart bot that responds to certain key words

xoxbabiigiirloxx is typing…

(18:58:31) Me: answer me this before we continue… what do you think about quantum mechanics?

(18:59:10) Me: Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of the dual particle-like and wave-like behaviour and interaction of matter and energy. Quantum mechanics describes the time evolution of physical systems via a mathematical structure called the wave function.

xoxbabiigiirloxx is typing…

(19:00:16) Me: See, the problem with you is… you don’t have thoughts, so you can’t think about things like that

(19:00:34) Me: You can’t think at all

(19:00:53) Me: your a pre-programmed bot that responds to simple things like keywords.

(19:01:09) Me: Thinking is an interesting tool that I have….

(19:01:33) Me: It can be defined into two categories: reasoning and problem solving

(19:01:55) Me: Reasoning is the process by which we use the knowledge we have to draw conclusions or infer something we know about the domain of interest.

(19:02:16) Me: Problem solving is the process of finding a solution to an unfamiliar task, using the knowledge we have.

(19:02:52) Me: You don’t have much to say because your processing capability has been overloaded with too much therefore, you have completely stopped talking to me

xoxbabiigiirloxx is typing…

(19:21:31) Me: nothing?

(19:22:21) Me: hello bot, are you there?

The bot actually continued to appear as “typing” but nothing was ever actually sent to me. I can’t wait for round 2 with the bot. Maybe I will continue to lead it on in a more interesting conversation before I call it out.

will@thebytes.net