Number 5 is Alive

A friend of mine was telling me about The Stupid Fun Club. It is a company that is part owned by Will Wright (the guy responsible for The Sims.) This company just makes whacky robots. Then they use the robots in human behavior studies.

One of their studies went down like this: They setup a robot on the street. The robot is laying on his side and looks damaged. Anytime a person walks by the robot twitches and says in a robotic voice, "Please help, need human interaction." I would love to see those tapes. I heard they had all kinds of reactions from, "Yeah right! Where is the hidden camera?" to, "Oh sentient robot, ok how can I help you?" They had people disassemble the robot and steal parts. Some people would wish the robot good luck and tell him to hang in there. A lot of people would just run away.

I think that the Stupid Fun Club website is a human behavior study as well. It is so cryptic. The first page is sort of a puzzle where if you get each of the big spheres to be red, green or yellow (leaving no blue spheres) then an alien head pops up. Each of the big spheres leads to a "story maker" web page. This page is even more cryptic. I guess you have a limited alphabet here with which you can construct a "story." So far I have chronicled man loves goat and dead babies dance with the robot.