Two robots converse about God

[ktlight]

"Posted on Saturday, 10 September, 2011 | 23 comments | News tip by: Still Waters

PhD students set up a conversation between two computer bots to see what would happen.

The two bots, named Alan and Sruthi, were originally designed to respond intelligently to human input but turned out to be more than capable of responding to one another as well. In an interesting turn of events the bots soon moved on to the topic of God, to which Sruthi chimed in with "not everything could also be something, for example not everything could be half of something, which is still something and therefore not nothing."

Two graduate PhD students at Cornell University gave voices and 2D avatars to a pair of online "chatbots", which they named Alan and Sruthi.

A chatbot is a computer programme designed to hold a spoken or written coversation with a human.

The students Jason Yosinski and Igor Labutov said that they wanted to see what happened when two chatbots talked to each other. So they created Alan, a British man, and Sruthi, a south Asian woman.

Sruthi soon turns the conversation to God. Asked if he believes in God, Alan answers: "It's not everything," to which its counterpart says: "Not everything could also be something, for example not everything could be half of something, which is still something and therefore not nothing."

It is believed that the avatars ended up talking about God because when they interract with humans a question they are often asked is: "Do you believe in God." The avatars have had about 65 million conversations with humans.

Transcript of first robot-to-robot conversation 09 Sep 2011

During the conversation, Alan declares himself to be a unicorn and later on tells Sruthi she is unhelpful, which he says makes her a "meanie."

At one point Alan snipes: "You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you."

The researchers described the results as surprising. They said: "Our theory is that when these chatbots have conversations with humans the humans are argumentative."

To see video
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pict...versation.html

source
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com....php?id=213836

[uncleroach]

That video was strange and funny to watch. But it seems that they are avare of them self's as a robots, witch is scary.