futuretrack5: Give your web applications life

"Give your web applications life" by DAVE

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 23:38:38 +0000

We have a few ideas brewing on making MonkeyBot a bit more public than he is currently. We'll unleash the monkey soon :)

"Give your web applications life" by SR

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:25:31 +0000

Is there a place we could upload various designs to see how MonkeyBot responds? I don't want to have to submit a dummy design on your main site. More details on how it works would be very appreciated.

"Give your web applications life" by DAVE

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 12:46:52 +0000

Hey Mike! Thanks for your words! That XHTML pidgeon idea just might fly! Looking forward to having a brew. Dave

"Give your web applications life" by http://www.mikeskinner.net/

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 11:06:23 +0000

MonkeyBot rocks! Easily one of the most entertaining posts I have read on FutureTrack. Next you will be training pidgeons to make XHTML ;-) http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html Oh man, if MonkeyBot had vaccuum/ironing skills I would kidnap him. Be careful Dave, I know where he lives :p Peace out

Give your web applications life

Dave Rosen — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 03:00:00 +0000

Do your web applications speak to you? Ours do.

XHTMLized gets quite a few quote requests. Most of these are from people wanting XHTML / CSS. However we get many photos of Care Bears and Baseball Players too.

Requests would come into the admin. Photos of Care Bears were flagged as dummy requests; else we’d provide a quote.

It was time consuming so Ilya had the brainchild to create MonkeyBot. MonkeyBot is our AI team member who helps make things happen.

Initially MonkeyBot was a learning algorithm that watched what we did. MonkeyBot collected the data on how we would handle quote requests. MonkeyBot then formulated his own hypothesis on if the quote was a dummy or not. After a couple of weeks MonkeyBot became quite intelligent and was capable of handling this task himself.

However before we could fully delegate the responsibility over to MonkeyBot, he needed the other basic component of AI: personality.

We gave MonkeyBot his own lingo, looks, style and stride. By doing this he seemed a lot more human. So we treat him a lot more like a human. We put him on all our projects, assign him new To-Dos and include him in daily FutureTrack5 activities.

Recently MonkeyBot has even been able to interact with us in Basecamp thanks to the new Basecamp API – but more details on this later.

So if you have some process in your web application that you would rather not do, create your own AI personality. Develop its brain and teach it to speak. You wont be the one on the team who’s going bananas.