FaceBot

As I'm still refusing to join the millions of 14 year old girls of the world on Facebook, I'm contemplating a compromise. This is a hypothetical program called FaceBot. Its a bit like the Turing Test, which is a test of a machine's ability to imitate a human. In the test a person sits in one room posing questions to 'someone' in the next room (either by typewriter or computer). The responder could be a real person or a computer. The test is to see whether a computer could fool the interrogator.

My variant of this would be to set up a Facebook account and have a bot accept invitations of others (I guess I might have to 'seed' it with a few contacts) then ingage in some of the random crap which Facebook is good at... so send people beer, play games of scrabble etc... I could also have it either post pictures from my Flickr account at random or simply add random images of Singapore). It would also change my mood intermittently (possibly with the lunar cycle, or based on my heartrate or something).

This would serve several purposes. Firstly it would test current programming capabilities and secondly it would stop people bugging me to join facebook while saving me the time of having to constantly tinker with it. Also it would be interesting to see how long it would go unnoticed.


Note. have just Googled 'FaceBot', turns out there's already a program (FaceBotPro) which does something along these lines (although looks more like a mass Facebook spamming device that a Turing Engine) Perhaps there is still a market for this.