cobot

So far, Cobot does not take the initiative in social interactions.

The users can punish or reward Cobot, and he will quickly learn which users want his help.

To do this, Cobot counts each player's actions and figures out what percentage is directed toward each other player.

At first, few participants spoke to Cobot, but when users discovered that he could provide them with illuminating details about themselves, he became quite popular.

A collaborative robot or Cobot is a robot that can safely and effectively interact with human workers in performance of simple industrial tasks.

It is arbitrarily considered male because LamdaMoo participants usually declare whether they are male or female and Cobot's inventors wanted him to fit in.

A CoBot (a portmanteau of collaborative robot) is a robot intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace.

"Cobot sits around in the living room - the center of social activity in LamdaMOO," said Dr. Kearns, who developed Cobot with Charles Isbell.

To observe these styles and to determine, for example, which chat room contributors are aggressive, which ones like to hug and which ones are skeptical, Cobot was placed in the LamdaMOO living room last year.

To keep Cobot from irritating users by taking the initiative too often or at the wrong moment, "Cobot will get rewards or punishments from the group as he learns," Dr. Kearns said.

"He began getting an enormous variety of utterances, thousands of interactions a day," Dr. Kearns explained, so instead of trying to write Cobot's responses to queries, the team stocked him with documents like the Unabomber manifesto and the script for "Planet of the Apes."