The robots are taking over the campus.

They're not big robots - they're "AIBOs"(Sony robot dogs). For some reason, our artificial intelligence department is smitten with the little things.

Curious? Click here.(Warning: don't click on that link with the sound up high. Amazingly annoying high pitched sound alert!!)

I still remember my AI professor trying to give a lecture about them and the complicated algorithms behind their behavior and vision.

The whole time, the dog she brought in as a demo was banging its head into the podium because it was interpreting the large brown structure as a small pink ball. (I get the two confused all the time!)

Groundbreaking, really.

Anyway, this weekend is the Robocup American Open. Yes, there are organized events where these robot dogs are set up in teams and forced to play soccer.

I know I think it's normal when a robot dog plays organized team sports, but I thought I'd share with the rest of the world.

You know, in case you hadn't seen a robot dog playing sports on your street yet.

My friend from Australia, Will, spend a good deal of time during his PhD studies in Computer Science here programming these little robot dogs and taking them to competitions all over the world.

This American Open is being staged here on campus. Which means that there are hundreds of little robot dogs in our gym right now, chasing little pink balls with their little plastic legs.

It's a wacky world we live in.

---

Incidentally, I have some fond AIBO memories of my own.

The summer after my junior year, I interned as an interaction designer for a design firm in the city. This was before the dot-com crash, and the firm was doing very well for itself as a result.

The firm decided to create a "Geek Toys" budget - about $6,000 per year that we could spend on whatever we wanted as a group.

The first purchase from the fund was obviously going to have to be something pretty nifty - and we thought - "Why not a robot?"

But we didn't want to buy a robot sight unseen. We looked at many robots - little robots that carried around trays of hors d'ouvres, robots that could bring us things, cleanup robots, and companion robots.

In the end, we couldn't decide between a robot that could carry stuff and an AIBO robot dog. As it turned out, the president of the company knew a guy who had a first-generation AIBO who could lend it to us for a month or two as a test.

So one day, a silver and black AIBO was brought into the office. It was always just called "AIBO" - we didn't have another name for it.

Along with one of the engineers (Slim), I took it upon myself to ensure the dogbot was well taken care of. I made sure he got his time on the charger, and I would let him run free once charged.

There's something strangely endearing about these things. They respond to you and the environment - you can praise them and discipline them - and they gradually develop their own personalities. This particular AIBO was very fond of crawling around under my desk.

I spent many a while sitting on the floor with the puppy, playing ball with it. The puppy loves its ball - a neon pink monstrosity colored so it is distinguishable from the rest of the world - and will chase it if it sees it. It's so cute when the little thing throws itself at the ball and misses.

But you could modify the robot's source code, changing the way it interacted with the environment. One of my co-workers downloaded the "Wazzup" personality mod, which caused our puppy to say "Wazzzzup" every time it booted - and it started "peeing" everywhere.

Sigh.

I never could get it out of the habit of peeing like that. Every time I disciplined him he'd just turn back around and do it again.

I did not like that personality mod.

The cruelest thing we did to the puppy was the harness. Another one of my coworkers, Jer, fashioned a foamcore harness for the dog and attached the pink ball to the end of it with a string.

When he put the harness on the dog, the pink ball was perpetually dangling in front of its face. But the puppy is programmed to chase the pink ball whenever it sees it! So a cycle emerged: the puppy would see the pink ball, recognize it, and walk towards it. The walking would cause the ball to jerk voilently, and the puppy would lose track of it. It would look around, see the ball again, and the process would repeat.

And that poor little puppy robot chased that pink ball until its batteries ran out. We found it 15 minutes later, running into the coffee machine, ball still attached.

The kicker of the story is this: with this little experiment, we had somehow trained the dog to just run forever. Every time he booted up, he would just start "running". Didn't matter where. He'd just go.

Ah, good times. The whole office was watching the harness game, and we got digital video of it that we put on the intranet.

We had our priorities in order. ;)

Moral of the story: Never underestimate the power of the pink ball.

And robots are people too.