I’ve done a little research here.

This pandorabot http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=af875acc8e345fec
is as of this writing is second to last on the most popular list with 1117 interactions.
this is also the default bot for a little toy I just bought in Second Life https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/DUMB-O-Pet-Pink-Boxed/1828255

The maker of this toy, has a variety of little toys that act similarly with the Pandorabot connection.

So far this is the only other A.I. toy or bot other than my original Pandorabot (from Missy Restless) that I have found for sale in the SL Marketplace. That doesn’t mean there are not others more popular than this, but the Marketplace is pretty much the main sales hub of content in SL. If anyone is interested in selling, they usually post it there.

I know this is a small sample size and I have no real broad view of every bot in SL, but if this is an example of an SL bot that is widely available (and cheap at about $2) and it only made it to the second to last on the most popular list, you really have nothing to worry about as far as Second Life usage for Pandorabots. Also the link above for Pikkubot seems to get alot of usage, you can see the numbers from their link, but those are not Pandorabots, they are running on their own server.

Amilie Anatine - Aug 10, 2011:

P.S.S> ... The creator of Pandorabots is in world and she/he? wrote up the script to connect the SL avatar to Pandorabots server.

correction, I just discovered Missy Restless is actually not the creator of the real life Pandorabots.com, I was mistaken. Missy only integrates Pandorabot into her SL product.

The creator of Pandorabots (or rather, one of the primary people responsible) is Dr. Richard Wallace, who was also instrumental in the creation of the AIML language, and is the creator of ALICE, one of the most popular chatbots ever. In fact, every chatbot on the Pandorabots servers is an AIML-based bot, and many (probably most) are not much more than slightly modified clones of the original ALICE bot. Even my bot, Morti is an AIML-based chatbot. there are certain questions that a user can ask a chatbot, and the answers to those questions can be a pretty good indication of whether a chatbot is an “ALICE clone”, since many botmasters don’t have the time or interest in editing each and every one of the tens of thousands of response categories that make up these bots. I’ve been at it for over a year now, on and off, and Morti still has a few responses that mark him as a “clone”.

Before I get tangled up in the minutiae, I feel the need to restate my original objection.

This is a forum devoted to chatbots. What would be the point in posting about off-topic matters, or listing links to Face Book pages, or Twitter, or just any chat site where people gather to talk about politics or deep sea fishing? Wouldn’t such postings be deleted?

At the top of this thread, I mentioned a YouTube video that depicts a chatbot (not a Pandorabot) that roams around Second Life and experiences numerous encounters where nothing serious takes place. It generally suffers abuse, and in one scene, another member can be seen jumping up and down on the bot’s head. Lots of people are all attempting to talk to it at the same time, and frequently, it’s even difficult to tell who the bot is answering.

I checked the Most Active/Popular list at Pandorabots yesterday, and as luck would have it, there weren’t as many Second Life bots as there have been at other times in the past. There were, however, several mobile apps, some of which are not free. There’s an IRC script floating around that allows people to attach 20 chatbots to a channel. One of the bots from that script that frequently appears on the Pandorabots Most Active/Popular list is a bot that was maintained by a botmaster who passed away in November of 2006. Clearly, it’s not there because anyone is promoting it, it’s because of the IRC script. You can also find a Pandorabot in at least one of the stores at SmallWorlds, and who knows where else.

By the way, would it be possible for two bots to encounter each other in Second Life as they roam (or fly) around) and engage in conversation?

There are several ways to discover which Pandorabots are in Second Life. One is to ask them, “Do you have a web site?”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having an interest in AI, or with having a chatbot in Second life… if a person is going to work on it. If bunches of Second Life participants are going to stick a Pandorabot in there just out of curiosity, and without improving it, I think it’s a waste of recourses, and it puts undue pressure on the free server.

As for not having to worry, people are always making things easier. http://geemix.com/?p=585

By the way…

This is the latest Most Active/Popular list.  I suspect that Identity Absent is a Second Life bot. 

Human: Do you have a web site?
Identity Absent: My home page is http://ohselavy.blogspot.com/.

Note the entry for Sunday, May 8, 2011, construct @ humlab, SL Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ HUMlab/95/215/351

Identity Absent has just made a recent sudden jump to the top of the list, as it often does, for no apparent reason.  Any time you see the top bot with twice the count as the next one in line, it’s a fair to assume that there is something amiss.  Why would a chatbot suddenly acquire so much traffic?

Identity Absent 159166
Qwerty 85344
9jawap robot 64624
Doug -q 53434
diary 44931
Obaid 43426
Clownfish for Skype 35082
IzarFree 24837
Cleopatra 24830
Meanie (Windows Doors) 15694
WinterMute 13256
turing_bot 10828
Eve 8654
Bizarre Babe 5883
suppandi 5016
lauren 4730
Jeepbot 4561
Panda 4407
Tomo 4323
twi 3677
Tiện Ích Online 3640
Oz 3623
Pimpbot 3579
smchatbot 3276
SimOne 2272
Thanos V 2261
Jenna Moonlight 2072
Laurie 1942
Sasori 1805
Barky 1712
Santa 1647
Grell 1613
Ciel 1599
Sanju 1534
Audrey 1524
Elizabeth 1449
くみこ 1448
God 1426
Sebastian 1245
Izar 1129
Alois 1124
Uncle Irving 1104
Archon68 1037
Nickie 1013
GAR-E 939

Identity absent may have ended up on a link in a very popular forum or blog.

Thunder - what facebook links do you speak of? I didnt see anything like that. Every link here as been on topic.

Would you like me to go in world and look to see if Identy Absent is present? or even email the maker and ask them?

Thunder, I think you should just go into Second Life and learn more about it before jumping to conclusions. Go see for yourself, you can immediately join and teleport to all the crowded areas and look for bots. You are inferring things based on circumstance. People who have websites discussing locations in second life are not always in second life, they are on the web as well, blogs, discussion forums and other chat rooms and groups. If it is a company they probably send out newsletters as well, or they get published in periodicals. Links to the chatbot can be in any of these media.

Yesterday at Starfleet Galactic, I demonstrated my Harley Pandorabot that I had running via an SL script. Another member there had their own chatbot running as well. The two bots kept responding to each other and it was very fast. It flooded our local and we picked them up and stopped it. This will push the numbers up quickly if two pandorabots are allowed to chat and left alone for a whole day, however that is going to be a very rare occurrence, as I have been traveling around SL for a few days looking for bots, and i went to a few infohubs (crowded public areas). I talk in local and IM any that have bot in their profile, none of them responded to me.

It takes more than the script I have to get a traveling pandorabot you also have to have a program to connect to an SL client such as Metabolt (see my links) the bot fly and tp seeking out crowds of people.  First of all, any creator would get shut down fairly quickly for abuse for flooding the local chat, the avatar would get ejected banned and muted almost immediately. Secondly if that was not possible and a chatbox was flooding local chat, and people were around it, they would mute and as a result the chatbot would no longer hear their chat and eventually interactions would cease.

If you are worried that the authors of that video are going to start letting loose a bunch of traveling bots, I am not.  The community will quickly adapt and react to it.

Again, SL is not an artificial world, it is a real world with real people. The bots are triggered by local chat, once the local chat stops, the bot is ignored. SL is far far too large to see any pandorabots talk to each other. Real people avatars rarely talk to each other in local, I really can’t imagine having as many pandorabots as people in SL.

Dave Morton - Aug 11, 2011:

there are certain questions that a user can ask a chatbot, and the answers to those questions can be a pretty good indication of whether a chatbot is an “ALICE clone”, since many botmasters don’t have the time or interest in editing each and every one of the tens of thousands of response categories that make up these bots. I’ve been at it for over a year now, on and off, and Morti still has a few responses that mark him as a “clone”.

My biological A.I. helped me learn this fairly quickly and this is what I do in SL now is test them for signs of Pandora like-ness.  Feel free to send me more info on this.

Amilie Anatine - Aug 12, 2011:

Identity absent may have ended up on a link in a very popular forum or blog.

I suppose it could have been for a lot of reasons, but it happens a lot, and in the next cycle it was completely gone from the list all together.  If it had due to a listing at some popular forum or blog, people sure lost interest in a hurry.  The “telling” point was that it had accumulated twice the number of interactions as the second most active/popular bot on the list. That sort of thing doesn’t just happen for no reason.

Amilie Anatine - Aug 12, 2011:

Thunder - what facebook links do you speak of? I didnt see anything like that. Every link here as been on topic.

I was speaking figuratively and trying to illustrate a point… it was a bad example, I apologize. I don’t understand having chatbots in Second Life any more than I understand a posting in this forum about knitting, or ice skating… or deep sea fishing.

There’s a Second Life discussion forum where the question is asked, “Why did you first login to Second Life”  As you’d expect, lots of different answers.  Some said for the creativity, some because they’d been at other similar sites or had played Sims and tired of it—they were looking for something new.  Many said it was a way to meet-up with RL friends, or to make new friends.  One said, “I came to look at the technology, but I stayed because of the people.”  I didn’t see one reply that said, “I was looking for chatbots.”

I appreciate your invitation to visit, but to be truthful, I’ve been involved in similar websites, and because I tired of the drama and all the freaky mumbo-jumbo, one day I went looking for chatbots.  I wanted to talk to someone without getting destroyed in the process.

As for two bots talking, I wonder if it can it happen by accident, or could two bots initiate a conversation on their own?  By the way, you might want to be careful, creating that situation is a Pandorabots TOS violation.

If you’d like to read more abut “ALICE identifiers, have a look HERE.

The two bots talking was a complete accident and we stopped it right away, but thanks for telling me that. As you just pointed out, this situation will be stopped if it occurred by accident in SL, which I don’t think it will because i think Linden Labs will also stop these types of bots.

thanks for the Alice identifiers. I will continue to approach all bots and try to see if they are Alice derivatives. So far i’ve not found anymore than the one I made and the little elephant i bought.

Amilie Anatine - Aug 12, 2011:

Identity absent may have ended up on a link in a very popular forum or blog.

identity absent is 1) a pandora bot, 2) a script-driven avatar, and 3) an artwork. at the moment, the pandora bot is mainly used in another artwork, the chatroom (http://ohselavy.blogspot.com/2010/11/chatroom.html). the reason why there’s so much traffic: identity absent operates in a closed feedback loop, that is, the bot talks to itself. the present discussion becomes part of the artwork, since “identity absent” deals, among others, with the question of how to create an identity.
hope that helps answering a couple of questions.

Thank you Selavy. This is a very interesting concept.  I see that Identity Absent is currently offline. I would like to meet this bot face to face some day.

I’ve written to Pandorabots.com today and I asked them what they considered “too much” with number of interactions.

As a scientist, I know that anything can be quantified, but no conclusions can be made unless an educated comparison of RELATIVE quantification is done. If Identiy Absent was the most popular bot yesterday, and had almost twice the interactions as the next one, that sounds excessive, but relative to what? How do we know that the total amount of traffic of the free bots is even significant to Pandorabot service as a whole?  What if the paid accounts typically drive 10x more traffic? This is what I hope to find out soon and I think the best source for this information is someone from Pandorabots.com.

Thunder Walk - Aug 12, 2011:

I was speaking figuratively and trying to illustrate a point… it was a bad example, I apologize. I don’t understand having chatbots in Second Life any more than I understand a posting in this forum about knitting, or ice skating… or deep sea fishing.

Please forgive my frankness, I am not trying to be rude or sarcastic but..

If you do not visit Second Life regularly, how can you ever understand Second Life enough to understand the usefulness of having something else within it? You never will unless you understand the significance of Second Life first.

I don’t think your analogy is good at all.

Thunder - you asked about Identity Absent almost exactly one year ago according to the Pandora forums?

Thunder Walk - Aug 12, 2011:

As for two bots talking, I wonder if it can it happen by accident, or could two bots initiate a conversation on their own?  By the way, you might want to be careful, creating that situation is a Pandorabots TOS violation.

can you show me where this is in the TOS? I can’t find it