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The Internet Books Media Book Reviews

Review:Bots: The Origin of New Species 39

Posted by Hemos from the faster-cleaner-better dept.
Rounding at a full week of stern reviews, stern takes a look at Andrew Leonard's new book Bots: The Origin of New Species. You may recognize Leonard's name from Wired and Salon. Click below to get the natural selection on his new book.
Bots: The Origin of New Species
author Andrew Leonard
pages
publisher HardWired Books
rating 5/10
reviewer Stern
ISBN
summary

Define "bot" as any long-lived software process which runs with little or no human input. Andrew Leonard tries to make them exciting.

The Scenario

Andrew Leonard is yet another Wired reporter who has written a book about the computer software that will take you into the next millennium. He discusses bots, long-lived software processes with some decision-making capability, in their native habitats of IRC, usenet, MOOs and the web.

What's Bad?

While it is safe to guess that bots, under the guise of autonomous software agents, will be major players in the computing world, in order to get a book's worth of material, Leonard had to define the class very broadly. As a result virtually anything from IRC eggdrop bots to that little dancing paperclip in Microsoft Word qualifies. The stretch becomes particularly visible when he reaches back into history to discuss the origin of bots and comes up with early backup software and 'Eliza' [Note to younger readers: Eliza was a program which faked human conversation, badly. It has been implemented in every programming language you can imagine]. In chapter 4, Leonard actually describes the Wumpus of "Hunt the Wumpus" as a bot, about as ludicrous an argument as you could imagine. [Note to younger readers: Hunt the Wumpus was a very simple, very stupid game that was played on university mainframes and the early home computers of the 1970s. You wandered (textually) through a finite network of caves. Each time you moved, the wumpus moved too, randomly. You could shoot arrows into adjoining rooms. If you hit the wumpus, you won. If you wandered into the wumpus, you lost. Look, Doom wouldn't be invented for another 20 years.]

Once he's defined 'bot' so broadly, Leonard has to contend with the universe of daemons and faceless applications which infest any modern operating system. Unfortunately, most of these are not very exciting and Leonard focusses on software which is more visible, and ideally anthropomorphic. This means that all his modern bots fall into a small number of classes: usenet monitoring programs (including cancelbots), IRC bots, MUD and MOO bots, and web spiders. This puts him in an awkward position -- this book is clearly intended for the mass market, but the vast majority of the discussion regards systems which his readers will never use.

Leonard very much wants to draw trends and lessons from the evolution of bots in these areas. Unfortunately for him, the universe of bots he chooses to discuss has been so short-lived that he can draw only the most banal conclusions. "Poorly tested bots can get into infinitely recursive conversations with each other." "AI bots do a poor job of mimicking human beings." "When evil bots are programmed, good bots are usually created to fight them. Both groups are then reprogrammed repeatedly in attempts to outsmart each other."

This book avoids the typical Wired error of quoting a bunch of "friends of Wired" as experts on whatever topic is at hand. However, it does slip into the magazine's absurd typography. Many paragraphs (selected randomly, as far as I can tell) start with an initial letter which is dramatically larger than the surrounding text, rotated sideways, and rendered in a different font. How hip.

What's Good?

The book is delightfully cerebral, drawing from Plato and Darwin, Gibson and Asimov. [Note to younger readers: Plato for his moral "demon", Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection (which, if you ask me, clearly does not apply), Gibson for the AIs in Neuromancer, and Asimov for the "Three Laws of Robotics"] The research is admirable, and Leonard tracks down the authors of an awful lot of the software he describes. I used MUDs a few times back in 1990 or so (and honestly never saw the point). Chapters 1 and 5 describe in amusing detail the troubles caused by bots at various MOOs, including an extended discussion of "The Barney Problem," or the 1993 swamping of Point MOOt by sloppily programmed Barney Bots singing the "I love you" song.

The discussion of Bot politics on IRC was instructive. I've been on EFnet for almost ten years now, but have always tried to avoid the undying politics of IRC-abuse and server control. As a result, I missed the inside scoop on why Alternet formed and why Nickserv went away, and so forth. Leonard fills in the gaps. Would this be as interesting to somebody who doesn't use IRC, or who uses it so much that they already know the stories? Probably not.

The material in chapter 3 on the failure of AI could form the core of its own book, a book about why AI looked so promising in 1980, the brilliant people who devoted their careers to it, and why it failed nonetheless.

"In part, the AI community doomed itself. Its own bold promises and early success led to a breathless boom period in the 1980s. Corporations rushed to adopt so-called expert systems -- programs that specialized in particular domains of knowledge and were supposed to represent the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of human experts. Unfortunately, most expert systems ended up requiring even more human resources than they replaced, and they often failed to work as promised" [stern: give me examples! juicy ones!]

"A sorry record of broken promises and the demise of the cold war dried up most AI funding and sent the artificial intelligence community reeling. Attendance at the premier artificial intelligence conferences declined. Morale sank to its lowest point when aspiring AI workers discovered that just putting the words artificial intelligence in a grant application guaranteed the kiss of death."

Those two paragraphs, on page 45, could be the first two paragraphs of a book about the past failure of AI and new methods being tried today, especially on the web. That book would probably be better than the one which Leonard has written.

Two Additional Notes

  1. Curiously, Amazon.com placed this book at the top of my personalized 'recommended books' list for months. Since this list is generated by the Netperceptions affinity engine, I can only imagine that it would not have made the list unless it was selling pretty well. This makes me perplexed about how it was marketed, since its true audience seems so small.
  2. One of the blurbs on the back (you know, the ones which normally say things like "A brilliant work of technical writing which I will treasure forever" -- Sylvester Stallone) reads, in its entirety,
    "Bot is short for robot, which is cooler than program."
    IRC hacker, John Leth-Nissen
    That seems rather random, doesn't it?

So What's In It For Me?

Leonard writes well, and his research can not be faulted. I look forward to reading his future books. This particular book should be of interest to people already familiar with (and curious about) robo-moderators on USENET, web spiders, IRC or MUDs/MOOs. If you do not fall into one of those categories, don't waste your time here.

If you're into this, pick up the book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

  1. A Plague of Barneys
  2. Daemons and Darwin
  3. One Big Turing Test
  4. The Bot Way of Being
  5. War
  6. Raising the Stakes
  7. On the Brink
  8. The Technodialectic
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Review:Bots: The Origin of New Species More

Review:Bots: The Origin of New Species

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  • Review is overly harsh (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've written bots for a long time, and even written them for a living. IMO the reviewer is being too harsh on the author's "wide" definition of "bot". Yes, of course Eliza was a bot. So was the wumpus. So are all the creatures on your level in Nethack. "Bot" isn't about complexity or "coolness", it's more of a design philosophy. It's software that you want to have acting akin to an autonomous being, regardless of how complex that behaviour actually is. Any number of algorithms could be implemented as bots -- sometimes it makes sense for hardware device drivers to be implemented as bots (though most of the time it does not).
    -
    -- Guges --
    -
  • Slashdot readers tend to be young, and overly enthusiastic. For every one of them, you get ten of me; over 40 and both enthused and indulgent.
    Most of these {negative} posters wouldn't know computer science from a bite upon their middle class indulged asses. They're hungry, and wish to be manly.
    (true, guys. You know these people. I did, when I was a kid.)
    True geeks write code and contribute. They're true warriors. Not pussy dilletantes battling over procedure.
    Performance matters. Wrap it however you want.
    Do not accept any criticism whatsoever from the lesser of these assholes without justification.
    Katz gets flamed here all the time, but you know what?
    The fucker can WRITE!
    Choose your enemies wisely.

  • YIKES!
    That was harsher than I meant it to be but was accurate, nonetheless.
    Len, you and yours over at salon are probably the only true online *magazine* out there. It reads like one... it FEELS like one... and now you're a linux partisan.
    All I can say is *THANK YOU* for supporting intellectual freedom.
    Thanks again...


  • Tough but fair (Score:4)

    by Andrew Leonard ( 4372 ) on Friday April 30, 1999 @10:12AM (#1908940) Homepage
    Stern's comments on the semantics of "botness" are, I think, well taken. Certainly it was the hardest thing to work out in the book. In my own defense, I'll note that I was pretty explicit about this problem in the book, and particularly with respect to the Wumpus.

    Slashdot readers will probably appreciate the fact that when I was researching the Wumpus, I dropped a line to the editor of the Jargon File, asking him if he thought there was any way the Wumpus could be considered a "bot." He flamed me so hard for my idiocy I almost had an aneurysm. And that was my first introduction to none other than Eric Raymond, long before anybody had heard, or said, the term "open source."

    Anyway, for people who hated the green ink, the weird typography, the unjustified margins -- I'm totally with you. I can only recommend that if you are interested -- get the paperback. It was published last fall by Penguin, and it looks very nice. Cheaper too.

    Cheers.

  • >Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural
    >selection (which, if you ask me, clearly does
    >not apply)

    Why isn't a programmer's fitness evaluator
    natural? I've always wanted to be a natural
    force. =)
  • Yah, and if we could now just get to the next stage. I am getting pretty bored with all these relatively similar games like quake, doom, halflife. The first-person thing was really cool when it first came out with Wolfenstien 3D and Doom. But now everything coming out seems to be the same-old same-old. Slightly better graphics, purportedly better (re: more complex) gameplay, but still the same walk-around a dark environment and kill the monsters things. Give me something else.
  • I enjoyed this book; it was interesting to read
    about those parts of the IRC bot wars that are
    not mentioned anywhere else.

    I do think that the audience for this book is
    small though: I picked up the hardcover on sale
    and it had been marked down *twice* to 1/4 of
    the original price.
  • Here's the deal, and also the reason why I won't buy this book.

    A "Bot" is inherent in both actual "Robots" and "Bots" because it is the program, software, whatever you wish to call it that makes the thing do what it does.

    A "Robot" is a discrete machine that uses its "Bot" to manipulate its hardware. A "Robot" by nature is a physical object, whereas a "Bot" can surface about anywhere you can create a system.

    Therefore, if your car had a "Bot" that actually controlled its own hardware, you would have a robotic car. But, if you have a system that does not manipulate anything but bits, you simply have a "Bot."

    I'm sure any of you /.ers would hesitate before calling AltaVista's crawler a "Robot", since the most hardware manipulation it does is saving information in a file (which thus is software) on a hard drive.

    I'm really kind of shocked someone who had researched bots as "extensively", as we are led to believe, would allow such an ignorant statement appear on his book, albeit "Robots" probably are good marketing. I don't know.

    PsychoSpunk
  • Well, you do have a valid point. However, etymology only goes so far. There are probably many examples for common etymological bases that lead to terms with similarities yet no real relation to each other. Unfortunately, since I'm a C.S. major I can't pull up any good ones at the moment. But if you want one, go find an English major, they love to be asked about the language and face it, they're not doing anything important but reading something by a dead guy anyway.

    hehe

  • try botspot.com [botspot.com]

    They have some good links if you dig around a bit, as well as things you can play around with. :)
  • I always define Bots as programs that appear to be intelligent. I define AI as programs that have intelligence and/or emotional states and can come to their own conclussions to problems presented them. For this reason a Bot is not always an AI but an AI is almost always a Bot. Though on to many occassions I've seen AI's that could not even reach the Bot status. Marketing, everything is a buzz word. :P
  • Taking this even further off topic...
    I have a copy of an old book from the People's Computer Company (anybody who hasn't read Hackers, shame on you) called What To Do After You Hit Enter, published in the late 70's (I think) when personal computers were just getting off the ground, and access to mainframes was more common. Mainly, it's a book of computer games (Wumpus, Hamurabi, Mugwump, Biorythm, etc.) with BASIC source code, all suitable for use on a TTY. What impresses me even today is the enthusiasm for the budding computer revolution which shows in every haphazardly laid-out page of TTY source and output listings, quirky program descriptions, scrawled notes, and cartoons. One of the main points of emphasis was how you could learn more about computers by tweaking the programs. What happens if you change this number? How can you add new hazards to the Wumpus caves? Maybe this spirit of exploration is something we would all do well to remember. Hey -- maybe converting some of these old programs is the project I need to teach myself Perl...
  • I think the core principle of a "bot" is autonomy. But it's not clear what autonomy is--- saying that it's "acting only in response to environmental inputs and current state", for example, is misleading. An object in C++ could be said to do the same thing, or a web server.

    Perhaps, like the Jargon file says, it's the masquerading as "human" (or at least as a "character") that makes a bot different from any other state machine.
  • Hunt the Wumpus is often used in AI classes (as it was in mine) as a context for coding an agent that operated without human input. That is, we coded a wumpus hunter that worked without any human input.
  • True, "bot" and "robot" are different terms, and describe different things. But the term "bot" was derived by shortening "robot." (Unless it was derived by shortenting "botulism," describing how a coder feel when his bot runs into a corner and turns left infinitely.)
  • Well, I'll give it a shot: automatic, a slang term meaning a firearm that does not need manual reloading, is derived from the same root as automaton, meaning, uhhhh, well, meaning "bot." (When speaking of turing-complete automata, not the finite automata that can only grok regular expressions.)

    Actually, reading my C-Tree manuals right now, I wished I was reading the work of a dead guy.
    /* Just kidding, friendly Faircom attorneys. :) */
  • The book says that the Wumpus itself is a bot, not an AI hunter created later.
  • I know it wasn't intended and I'm not gonna make a big deal about it. But us younger folks know who Dante, Asimov, and the like are. Just because we are younger doesn't mean we don't read.

    --

  • The book was published in '97.

  • Hmmm, sounds like an interesting book actually. Makes me want to write that BattleZone bot that I've been thinking about. Now where did I put that protocol analyser? :-)

    Thad

  • {SARCASM}
    A flame of my sig line got moderated up? Ah well, the perils of a free forum :-)

    Yes, the quote is certainly from Grouch_o_ Marx. I'll pull out my MLA handbook shortly and make the proper attribution in an appropriate format...
    {/SARCASM}

  • I read this book last year, and thouroughly enjoyed it - except for the annoying green ink the pages are printed in :-)

    Note to Booksellers - I bought this book for one reason: the first chapter was available online at amazon.com. Once I'd read that, I ordered it immediately. Posting first chapters is the way to overcome the one deficiency of buying books online, the inability to thumb through it.

  • Third Post!!!

    I read this book last year and found it to be really good. I loved almost the entire thing. Recently I've been learning about AI, and this book has been very interesting. I recommended it to all my geek friends.

    Racher
  • See this wired article [wired.com] by Leonard, from a few years back.
  • Does anyone have any links to online articles about bots that they'd recommend?

  • I got flamed a couple of weeks ago after being too generous to Wendy Grossman's book net.wars and may have overcompensated in this review.



    EVERYBODY GO OUT AND BUY THIS BOOK.It is better than I made it sound.

  • I thoroughly enjoyed Hunt the Wumpus. At the time it was a great game to play. I still have found memories of seeing "I smell a Wumpus" appear on the paper.

    Younger readers: Find and play it. You'll get bored quickly, but in the process learn where we came from. And just how far we have come.

    Philip

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