Monthly Archives: April 2010

Bot Colony: learning English and improving analytical skills

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Learning English

As you play Bot Colony, you’ll travel through an exotic island and have many conversations with robots and occasional humans.

In order to be understood by our virtual characters (robots or humans), you must speak good English. There will be a version of the game (our ESL Beta) configured so that characters give you feedback related to your spoken or written English – spelling, syntax, choice of words in a particular context. If they did not understand your pronunciation, you will be able to see what they think you said, and try again until they do. If you want to practice your written English – just type instead of speaking. When you think about it, this is exactly what a real-life English tutor does – she/he corrects you in real time when you speak, or corrects your papers. No English teaching package available today can do this, because computers don’t yet understand English (except ours; if you keep it simple, you should be able to get through). The ability to provide YOU with customized feedback to the mistakes that YOU make means that playing it can improve your language skills.

Whether you`re a student, a professional, or a business person, it is more fun to learn English in real-life situations where you actually have to speak the language, than just do boring exercises. In this sense, the world of Bot Colony is very close to real life. Playing to learn is probably a very effective learning method, since the student is really motivated (to advance in the game and have fun).

Studies have shown the developing literacy and analytical thinking is the key to raising the standard of living of a society. We will be very happy if Bot Colony, besides entertaining the players, can help people in developing countries improve their lives through better education.

Bot Colony – the novel

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After almost two years of work (mostly week-ends, evenings and early mornings), the Bot Colony manuscript is complete! The novel weaves industrial espionage, Computational Linguistics and robotics into a science-fiction thriller. The book will soon go to print. We’re in a race against time to complete the Closed-Beta software. Buyers of the books will get a block of hours to try the game as soon as the Closed-Beta opens.

Bot Colony -Book cover

The storyline is 50% attributable to the work on the game script, and 50% to insights from the development of the natural language dialogue technology used in the game. The latter turned out to be extremely hard to develop, and always ran over schedule. Our company, North Side, doubled in size since GDC. The NLP technology and the game assets evolved in parallel, and will continue to do so in the future, as more levels come online. Both the language technology and the assets are (much) more advanced than in March 2009, when we unveiled the Bot Colony technology prototype at GDC. You can still see that technology demonstration video of on YouTube. It is very, very prototype. Visit this website again before E3 for a game-play demo video. Better still, visit our booth at E3 to try the game (West Hall 4325).

The Bot Colony book is not intended to be a manual for the game. I wrote it to be a science-fiction novel that can be enjoyed on its own. However, the reader will get a good understanding for what a machine will understand, what it won’t, and why. The dialogues in the book are a precursor of the particular style of language-based interaction with machines that works well in our game, and that we’ll see in the future all around us (this language is called Literal in the book). Literal is a very clean, precise, factual kind of English. I think there’s a lighter side to it. Read the book and you’ll discover it. Some of the dialogues in the book are the result of trying to solve some very real NLP problems. Many of us practically lived in Bot Colony for the last few years while we taught the robots to speak. You can sample an excerpt from Bot Colony here.