February 17, 2004

What I’m Supposed to Be Doing

by Nick Montfort · , 6:26 pm

In case you were wondering about my life as a computer and information science Ph.D. student at Penn, I’ve put some information about my research, teaching, and studies online.

2 Responses to “What I’m Supposed to Be Doing”


  1. michael Says:
    February 18th, 2004 at 9:59 am

    I’m amused that, on your chatterbot mediation poster, your chatterbot timeline jumps from Eliza to the work that you and Charles are doing. The IRC bot trace of the Brandon Vedas incident is interesting.

    Do you think computational behavioral game theory will have applications to autonomous believable agents?

  2. nick Says:
    February 20th, 2004 at 12:59 am

    I did elide a lot on the poster, but I didn’t skip straight to the work I was involved with – Cobot a system that Charles did previously, which I wasn’t involved in at all. Glossing over the rest of chatterbot history was necessary there, but I hope there will be additional good tellings of that history in the future, following on things like Andrew Leonard’s book Bots (presaged in this article).

    Regarding your question about believable agents, Michael – the short answer is yes, I think computational behavioral game theory wil be important in all settings where agents have to make or anticipate economic decisions, and where doing this is significant. This is actually a wide variety of settings, although not all activity is best seen in an economic framework. Still, consider that if you barter with an agent (as might easily happen in a virtual world) and it behaves in a way that is “rational” (according to classical economics) but completely unrealistic, the experience won’t be believable.

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