SL Grid Issues and the Future

I woke up early this morning to begin working in Second Life, as I have done for about six months now since Metaverse Technology opened our headquarters there, to find that the grid is once again down. I spent about twenty minutes reading through then Linden blog, and the 323 comments that had been posted by the time I got to the end, and realized that this would be a good time to address all of these grid closures.

If you haven’t been following the story so far, let me catch you up. Second Life is a 3D virtual environment created and maintained by the residents, or at least that is the tag line. In many regards it is true. You can build 3D objects, from houses to cars to anything you can visualize, and endow these objects with functionality through a basic script programming language. One of the main draws of SL(Second Life) is that the virtual economy has a direct exchange rate to RL(Real Life) currency. Lindens to dollars, about 280 to 1 on today’s market exchange.

The Lindens, representatives from Linden Labs which is the parent company of Second Life, really try to let you do your own thing. That has been one of the problems this last month. With such a spirit of openness, including the recent removal of the credit card requirement for registration, the grid has been subject to recent attacks. Although that is not what is causing the grid closure today, and we’ll get to that in a moment, hackers have been responsible for at least three serious attacks this month, all causing grid closures. Basically they create some type of self replicating, self dispersing, grey goo in an attempt to overwhelm the servers. Either they are getting better at it, or the Lindens are slowing down, because the successful attacks are getting more frequent.

These aren’t the only problems that we are seeing on the grid. Spam attacks where objects repeatedly and continuously attempt to direct you to a website from with SL, Linden released patches that don’t operate as expected, and sporadic problems that can’t be associated with a single source. Today’s outage is due to a permission exploit, that could allow someone other then the owner to gain access to an object or a script. As a growing virtual economy, the permission system is the only intellectual property protection available, and therefore its integrity is crucial to SL success. It has been a rough month for all involved.

So what do most SL residence think about these issues? It really is difficult to say. As in any community the most vocal residents are often the most polarized. (I am generalizing as there are always exceptions and I am sure you are one of them.) The forums and blog comments are filled with the continuous flame wars on the nature of the Lindens, Saints vs. Demons. I’m not sure if any of that is helpful to the process, but it is good for communities to have outlets that are relatively benign. I’m sure the Lindens watch these outlets, but I certainly hope they don’t make business decisions because of them. The unfortunate problem is that it doesn’t matter what the current user base thinks of the problems. I know that sounds harsh, but listen to me for a minute.

For whatever reason, SL already has us hooked. We are the early adopters, and although many of us can’t count or stay in years yet, we do have an edge on the hundreds of million potential residents to come. If a brand new SL from another company came out tomorrow most of us wouldn’t change, but what we need to think about are the people that haven’t made the choice yet.

Second Life is at a crucial stage in its existence. RL media attention is getting fierce. I don’t think that we have gone a week without SL being in a major reputable RL publication or feed, and Wired has had an article every month for quite a while. Major corporations are beginning to take interest, and yes that comes with its own problems but usually means were going to have the luxury of arguing about it for a lot longer. My favorite barometric of SL spreading to the masses is how easy is it to explain SL to others. No it’s not just a game exactly, yes it is a MMORG sort of, lindens are a real currency, no it’s not ebay. The truth of the matter is that the next 12 months will very likely determine the long term success or failure of Second Life. It will either continue it’s existence as a quaint little virtual experience, whose numbers are kept small by these mitigating factors, or it will explode into millions and millions of residents with a virtual economy that will give federal governments around the world indigestion.

I don’t think you have to wonder which option I place my vote on, but the cold hard truth is that this is up to the Lindens. I’m not saying that they can just wake up one day and say, oh maybe we would like to succeed. Or that even if they do everything right, we are all going to make it to the promise land. What I am saying is that if they don’t do something more we are certainly not going to make it.

I think that the Lindens have done, and are doing an amazing job. The complexity and scaling of such an endeavor is unimaginable. The commitment to openness means that certain problems will always have to be dealt with, and they are pushing the limits is realms that haven’t been explored before. Without the Lindens we would be having this conversation. Having said that, they have to do more, and they have to do it soon.

There has to be a better way to repel malicious grid attacks. I don’t think going back to credit card registration is the solution, but perhaps some type of targeted response is necessary. I certainly don’t profess to have a understanding of the millions of lines of code, that I have never seen, required to run SL, but there has to be a tiered response capability. If the Lindens declare a grid attack, all non-verified users and their objects are shutdown immediately. The next step would be residents with less then six months are also locked down until the attack is over. There has to be something.

The issue that I think the Lindens have the most control over is the update process and the permission exploits. If you have too, slow down the update process. If it means that the grid is going to be off again on again for days after every update, the new features are not worth the hassle. Test longer. I don’t know what to say, there is a reason why IT people don’t like Microsoft.

In the end what are you going to do? Second Life is the closest thing to the Metaverse currently in existence, and we are terribly excited about the possibilities. We are here to stay, and will help in any way that we can.

AI in Second Life, Chabot Evolution

If you though that George from Jabberwacky was cool, wait until you see the chatbots in Second Life. They display facial expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication, they can navigate and interact with their virtual environment through script and sensors, all while carrying on the same natural language conversation used by web based chatbots.

George that I mentioned earlier has gained recognition for winning the 2005 Loebner prize for being the most advanced artificial intelligence on the planet. The Loebner prize is based on the Turing Test, don’t worry we’ll get to that in a moment, and there seems to be a heated contest between Richard Wallace’s A.L.I.C.E. and Rollo Carpenter’s George for the title. Although Carpenter’s winning entry this year was named Joan. Still, these men have devoted amazing research and time into developing chatbots to compete in this test. What is interesting to me, and what I think these gentlemen have figured out, is that the Turing Test is not about producing human level intelligence. It is about fooling human level intelligence into not noticing that they are discoursing with a program that is not as smart as them.

What do I mean by that you might ask. Combing through AIML, Artificial Intelligence Markup Language which is an amazing program concept in and of itself, it becomes apparent that there are only so many decision trees that you can account for in a limited space. Even when, as discussed in the literature at the A.L.I.C.E. foundation’s website, many conversations lead to the same branches, it is the random quirkiness of human interaction that determine our ability to pass in what is primarily a highly evolved society of sensory apparatus. Much of our energy consumption is used to support that grey goop sitting on your neck, and much of that is devoted to silly things like communication, social interaction(yes it is social even if it is just online), and the root of all intelligence – abstraction. To get back to the point, the best chatbots use subtle types of distraction when the conversation goes beyond the boundaries of there main decision trees to direct things back to a manageable point. They throw off-hand comments, or ask seemingly random questions to pull you back into the illusion. It is a great tactic, because it is one that human’s employ frequently, and it can be mistaken for the quirkiness of intelligence. Also it is good for a few laughs, because let me tell you, those bots can kick out some zingers when your not expecting it. But what does this all mean for our search for intelligence. I’m not sure that is the point of the exercise.

Alan Turing set out very explicit terms in his 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence" to find something that could imitate a humans conversation so well that you couldn’t tell the difference. Fake, deceive, pull one over. The test is to mislead a human judge into thinking the computer is the human in a three person conversation. At the time he suggested that a teletype be used to limit the test to linguistic capabilities, because the technology at the time was insufficient to bring other factors such as an audible voice into the equation.

So this brings us finally to the thing I really want to talk about, chatbots in Second Life. If you haven’t heard about Second Life, I’m sorry. Put the WOW down for a minute, check out what’s going on, because the potential with SL is the closest thing we have seen to the Metaverse, by a long shot. Second Life is a 3D world created and maintained by the residents. Stop the presses! The users, the masses, the inmates, are running the asylum. Objects are created, and I talking about amazing 3D renderings of whole worlds, and endowed with awesome functionality through a very straight foreword scripting language.

Chatbots, using the llHttpRequest function, are beginning to show up in Second Life. People are interested in them to add interaction to there casino or dance hall. Serve as salesbots in their stores, bartenders in there clubs, and educational institutes are looking towards them as information providers and basic instructors. What makes me intrigued is there ability to expand the concept of the Turning test. Turning chose to limit the concept at the time to text based communication, because it would be too hard otherwise. I see his point, but I think we are missing something. Yes, trying to mimic voice patterns that express emotion is incredibly hard. Adding body movement in a 3D environment just seems like making the test harder. But so much is added with the ability to include nonverbal communication. That subtle some what random shift of the human body with whom we are conversing reassures us is ways we don’t consciously recognize. Things like posture and other hints like facial expressions provide enrichment that is lacking in text limited conversations.

Not to mention that amazing potential of chatbots that can easily draw upon environmental information, as well as control that same environment as well. Using scripts the chatbots can access location and status of objects and avatars around them, and access any and all functions we can think to add. For example, I can conceive of bots that can control video feeds, manipulate object size, location, or function. Bounce unruly guests, and fetch needed tools.

The addition of sensory information, and environmental interaction, greatly enhance the capabilities of AI in ways that we hope to see with robotics here in our first life over the next few decades. It adds depth that web based chatbots will never accomplish. It could go a long way in fooling you into thinking it might be controlled by human level intelligence, and isn’t that what we all are trying to do. Okay, maybe not the human part, but certainly the intelligence.