Archive for the ‘technical’ Category

Our Life online – Workshop+debate – 24 February 2012 at CCCB

Friday, February 17th, 2012

The first session of I+C+i 2012 carries out a critical explanation of software policies, the notion of identity on the social networks and the impact of simulation caused by new artificial life applications. A workshop taught by Naked on Pluto, winners of the VIDA 13.2 prize and Gerald Kogler, and a discussion with the participation of experts such as Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux, and Mónica Bello, promise an intense day of action and reflection on lesser known aspects of our life on the web.

Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

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Setting up Naked on Pluto at ARCO

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

If you are in Madrid this week come to visit the exhibition of VIDA
13.2 showcasing some of the projects awarded in the last edition of
the Art and Artificial Life International Awards, including Naked on Pluto. You will find us at the Fundacion Telefonica stand at Arco Madrid.

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Library projection progress

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Resuming work on the installation

Friday, January 20th, 2012

And another secret preview. We’ll explain what’s in the books soon.

Starting work on a “live world” projection

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

Following on from the VIDA win, we need to work hard on Naked on Pluto’s gallery installation presence. Although we now have the news website style front page, we need to take the game externalisation to another level, and one of the things required is a realtime projection of the game world. This represents the unfiltered behind-the-scenes view of the game as seen by the bots as they attempt to keep track of what is going on. Technically we decided to do this work using HTML5 canvas, in keeping with the web based themes of the game it needs to work on a browser, which has the added bonus of making gallery setup quite simple.

My first approach was to write a scheme bricks representation for Javascript objects, and see how bits of the game looked if rendered in this way.


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Golden Medallions and in-game programming

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Once the low level code for a Naked on Pluto bot is written in Scheme, it’s added by the game using secret commands which program the game inside itself, while it’s running. This means the game can be changed while people are playing it – which makes it much easier to add new things without worrying about the disruption caused by restarting the server. We can also work on the game collaboratively, at the same time this way.


(Programming a spybot with it’s behaviour)

Eventually the plan is to be able to program the bots fully within the game client – this is still a long term goal, but there are of course some fairly complex security problems with this idea.


(dressing a AudienceBot with another object)

Not all players have the ability to use these secret commands right now, in order to access them a player has to be carrying a special object (also known as a “Golden Medallion”). This allows you access to all areas of the game, including an “administration room” and various other secret powers.

Bots as WordPress Editors

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

As mentioned in previous posts, we have resumed our work on Naked on Pluto and are at the moment working on the idea of a newspaper which content would be entirely generated by bots. Nothing new under the sun, as automated blogging and generating content from the output of scraping spiders has been increasingly popular to drive traffic in order to generate ad clicks or to manipulate its readers in downloading some malware. The difference here is that our content will be the result of various interviews and reports “written” by a couple of newsbots wandering in Elastic Versailles.

Just like our cleaner bot, we will be using existing platforms, more precisely the newspaper will be a good old WordPress blog and each bot will have its own editor account. Thanks to XML-RPC, making the bridge between EVr14 ecosystems and the blog was quite trivial.

#!/usr/bin/python

import xmlrpclib, sys

target = 'http://nothing.now/xmlrpc.php'

if len(sys.argv) >= 6:
    try:
        post = {'title': sys.argv[4], 
                'description': sys.argv[5], 
                'categories': [sys.argv[3]]}
        blog = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(target)
        blog.metaWeblog.newPost('Plutonian Times', 
                                sys.argv[1], 
                                sys.argv[2], 
                                post, 
                                1)
    except:
        print 'OOPS: ' + str(sys.exc_info()[1])
else:
    print 'Usage: '+sys.argv[0]+' user password category title content'

We still have to figure out what kind of generative information will be made with this script when it’s called from scheme, but no matter what in a couple of days we should have the first edition of this newspaper up and running!

Naked on Pluto goes to São Paulo

Monday, July 4th, 2011

Naked on Pluto has been selected for FILE festival São Paulo 2011 which, in addition to some funding from the Finnish Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK) allows us to develop the game for an art gallery installation setting.

I’ve been reacquainting myself with bot programming, and trying some experimental and dangerous things with conversations.

As an example, here is a bot that simply repeats things it overhears – if you throw a couple of these in a room and start them going by saying something – chaos follows as they start to repeat you and then each other’s messages:

(define (talkative-action entity graph node)
  (if (and
       (< (random 5) 3) ; do this 3 out of 5 times
       (< (length (pluto-node-old-messages node)) 10)) ; safety valve
      (foldl                ; loop over all the messages
       (lambda (msg node)
         ; get the name of the sender
         (let ((name (entity-name
                      (pluto-node-entity-get
                       node (pluto-message-from msg)))))
           (pluto-say-to-random ; make a new message 
            node                ; to a random entity
            entity
            (string-append ; build the message
             (choose
              (list
               (string-append name " just said: ")
               (string-append "I just heard " name " saying: ")))
             (pluto-message-txt msg))))) ; repeat the message
       node
       (pluto-node-old-messages node))
      node))

@NopCleanerBot

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010


In our continuing efforts to embrace all “social media”, one of the bots in Naked on Pluto has started a twitter account. Could this be the first character in a FaceBook game to tweet?
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What do we do with your data?

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Now we have people playing the game, it’s a good time to explain what happens with your facebook data in more detail. Given the nature of the project it’s important for us to make this clear. Here is a diagram I’ve prepared for the presentation we are giving at Piksel at the weeked:


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