Software Development Magazine: Inside the Stupid Fun Club.  Software Development Magazine wrote an article called "Inside the Stupid Fun Club" (registration required).
The author, Alexandra Weber Morales, unexpectedly encountered the
Sad Robot, broken down and crying for help on the streets of Oakland.
We were shooting a couple of hidden camera reality TV "One Minute Movies"
for NBC: one of a Sad Robot torn apart into pieces and pleading for
help from passers by, and the other of a Robot Waiter taking orders,
serving food and bantering for a tip in a barbecue restaurant.
I developed the custom "robot brain" software for Will Wright's
Stupid Fun Club, mostly in Python. It involved writing lots of high
level Python code and XML data, and integrating all kinds of different
software components together with SWIG, C++, ActiveX, Java, IRC, HTTP
and WiFi. The robot features 3D facial animation, speech synthesis and
recognition, conversational scripting, artificial intelligence,
personality simulation, telerobotic remote control via wireless
networking, with an interactive web interface for controling its
behavior in real time.
For another Stupid Fun Club project, I also used Python to develop
expressive synthetic speech authoring tools (audio speech
“phonoscoping”, like visual animation “rotoscoping”), and talking toy
simulations.
Python is ideally suited for brainstorming and prototyping new
product ideas, as well as developing custom real-time robotic software
for supporting creative Stupid Fun Club projects like reality TV
production.
Eventually, Alexandra Weber Morales tracked down the person responsible, Will Wright, at his private production company, the Stupid Fun Club. She asked Will about the Sad Robot:
Uh, OK. So, what kinds of reactions did people have to Sad Robot?
Wright: A lot of people were talking directly to it. Most of
the women who were walking alone just sped up like they were spooked by
it. Most of the single men would stop and start stripping it for parts,
ignoring that the robot was talking to them. And it was mostly the
couples who would actually interact with it and try to help it. Some
would have long conversations, pushing the buttons.
We had a whole sort of troubleshooting thing, and we wanted to see
how far people would go to help it. It was sort of a Good Samaritan
experiment.
She also asked about the software we developed to control the robot,
simulate its personality, animate its face, and listen and talk with
people.
Have you heard of an AI knowledge base called Cyc?
For the conversational side of it, we’re using something similar to
Cyc—in fact, we were looking at Cyc. There’s so many different layers.
First of all, there’s the voice recognition, which is getting much
better but is still pretty limited. Then, once you have the voice, you
go into the conversation engine, and then it’s doing something like Cyc
or Alice or Eliza: trying to give an appropriate response to what your
input was. One of the projects we’re working on here is this toy design
where we have these toys that converse with each other via infrared
text-to-speech.
There are all these different approaches to AI. Some of them are
more brute force, like Cyc. There’s also artificial life, an attempt to
evolve systems rather than build them from the ground up.
Where’s this work being done?
The Santa Fe Institute is one place. There’s genetic programming, or
adaptive systems, to give computers a way to learn and get feedback.
That looks like a more promising approach.
Back in the ’60s, when computers were first being used in business,
everybody assumed we’d have artificial intelligence in 10 years. When
2001 came out, in 1967, and people came out of that movie saying, “I
can’t believe that a computer will be able to play chess that well.”
But they took the conversation with HAL for granted. In fact, it was
the opposite: Chess turned out to be the easy part; natural
conversation turned out to be the hard part. Within 20 years, we’re
going to have machines like this that have full autonomy and pretty
good conversational ability. We could build a stove that would have a
long conversation with you. So the real interesting question for me now
is, what’s going to happen when our world is surrounding us with
intelligent machines? These are going to be the first aliens we meet.
Describe the software running this thing.
The conversational chatbot is Alice. It takes input and you give it a dictionary to define what it knows about. [ALICE
is written in Java, so Python talks to it through an IRC server running
on the robot. We can connect to the same IRC channel over the wireless
network, watch the messages going between ALICE and the brain, and
interject text to speak, switch modes, play facial animations, effect
the personality, executie commands, etc. -Don]
Winter:That’s connected to Microsoft speech recognition, which is fantastic. [I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't suck, but "fantastic" is a stretch. -Don] And some simple AI, since Alice may or may not understand what you’re talking about.
Winter: The most intelligent thing it ever did is we had an
opera singer in here singing to the robot, but the robot didn’t like
it. So she said, “maybe I should explain the story,” and after the
singer finished, the robot paraphrased the whole thing back to her. It
was about the most amazing thing we’d ever seen; we all just about
started believing in robots at that moment.
When we take these in public, it seems like the people who are less
technical savvy are the ones who interact with it, whereas the people
with technical backgrounds are standing there reverse-engineering it.
Are you following what MIT has done with humanoid robots such as Kismet?
Wright: There are lots of research labs around the country
building these types of robots, but they never take them out into the
public. We drive them into a laundromat or a restaurant and see what
the response is. When we filmed Sad Robot, we also filmed a scene in a
restaurant with a robot waiter. It was interesting how many people
totally bought it. Usually within three or four minutes, they were
completely normal about it. People kind of expect that there will be
robots in the future; it’s just a matter of when.
Robot: If you could have any kind of robot, what would it be?
The goal is elimination of crime, combined with rehabilitation of
criminals … Yes, it seems very long to me, too.
What do you use for automated testing?
Our own suites. Most of our stuff is in C++ [also Python and XML -Don],
but we have a proprietary visual scripting language I designed, called
Edith, for the behavioral code for the Sims. It’s totally geared to AI
and the Sims. [But Edith doesn't run on the robot, it's for programming The Sims. -Don]
Winter: I think it’s time for the Christmas robot.
Wright: Are you running that … weapon? I don’t know if we
want to sit here. [A dancing snowman on a wheeled platform with a
circular saw mounted on its front bumper approaches a plastic toy-store
robot.]
Winter: No, you would die. You’d better take cover.
[The interview ends.]
The snowman quickly demolishes the toy, shooting debris throughout
the warehouse. With Winter’s encouragement, I spend 10 minutes in a
nonsensical conversation with the robot. He also shows me the Minute Movie that have been made for NBC—and they’re hilarious.
I leave this unconventional interview impressed with the way the
Stupid Fun Club has turned a fascination with robots and toys into a
lucrative and wholly entertaining enterprise. Meanwhile, the larger
concerns about the technical strengths, limitations and implications of
these semiautonomous machines go mostly unanswered. Wright and Winter
seem firmly on the side of presentation, and somewhat unwilling to
delve deeply into how their toys work—as if to say, “Where’s the fun in
asking all these questions? Just talk to the robot.”
I'm certainly interested in delving deeply into how the
robot brain works myself, but not everyone else is. So I used Python to
develop a high-level XML based AI and wireless web remote control
system, which enables creative writers and designers like Will Wright
to script and control the robot behavior, and reconfigure it for
different scenarios, without needing to deal with Python, C++ or the
other software components that went into building it. [Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron] 
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