Out of rally room, virtual evil and chicken

We at VTOR want to congratulate President elect Obama. It was a moment not to be forgotten in real life history. As you might expect, running out of space wasn’t just a problem at real world rallies (ok, that’s sarcasm, I saw no reports of running out of space), it extended to virtual worlds. USA Today (emphasis mine):

Elsewhere, dozens of Obama supporters clapped, danced and cheered inside the behemoth virtual world Second Life immediately after the Democratic nominee seized the electoral votes. Many avatars were left out of the virtual celebration in Obama’s unofficial Second Life headquarters because the digital enclave had reached maximum capacity Tuesday.

Although running out of space at Second Life may not be surprising, I wonder if researchers Bringsjord and Smith are going to program this virtual evil bot named ‘E’ to react according to how avatar crowded it is around it?

The researchers have placed E in his own virtual world and written a program depicting a scripted interview between one of the researcher’s avatars and E. In this example, E is programmed to respond to questions based on a case study in Peck’s book that involves a boy whose parents gave him a gun that his older brother had used to commit suicide.

If you see ‘E’ walk the other way, this virtual bot is bad to the bone. Thanks Boing Boing for the after Halloween virtual chills. Curious what a search for ‘evil’ under places in Second Life would return, I typed in and the results are shown in the picture above.

Funny thing, while logging in to run this search, a stranger holding a KFC chicken bucket stopped by our VTOR parcel to offer me some chicken.