A semiotic landscape contains all the semiotic relationships that effectively occurred at least once in the games played by a particular population of agents during a certain period of time. The semiotic landscape is a graph. The nodes in the graph are formed by situations (referents in a specific context), meanings, and forms (words), and there are links if the items associated with two nodes indeed co-occur (Figure 7.9). In a more

5 See Badii & Politi (1997). Examples of ways to model evolutionary systems are shown in Kauffman (1993) and Maynard Smith (1989).

6 The website http://talking-heads.csl.sony.fr/ contains the latest statistics on this world-wide evolution. The observational tools were mainly built by Joris Van Looveren and Frederic Kaplan.

Figure 7.9: Typical segment of a semiotic landscape capturing the co-occurrence relations between referents, meanings and word forms. The FM/MF relations are in thick lines, the RM/MR relations in regular lines, and the RF/FR relations in dashed lines.

complete picture, the landscape makes a distinction between external referents and segmented images but I will not do so in the present chapter. The relations in the landscape are labeled as in Table 7.8.

The partial landscape in Figure 7.9 (taken from an actual experiment) contains an example where the agents use two possible meanings for conceptualising *situation2*, namely [gray 0.0–0.25] (very light) and [hpos 0.5–0.75] (medium right ). The words *katapu* and *tisame* lexicalise [gray 0.0–0.25] and *wobo* and *tisame* [hpos 0.5–0.75]. Each meaning has therefore two synonyms and *tisame* is ambiguous; it can mean both [gray 0.0–0.25] and [hpos 0.5–0.75]. Three words are used to communicate the situation: 'katapu', 'tisame', and 'wobo'. Such a structure is typical for grounded lexicon evolution and complexity rapidly increases when the same meanings are used to communicate about other situations (which is obviously very common and indeed desirable).

*7.2 Semiotic dynamics*

#### **7.2.3 Competition diagrams**

The degree of coherence of a language system can be studied by collecting data on the frequency of the members of each relation in the semiotic landscape for given periods of time (for example periods of 100 games). The result is represented in competition diagrams, such as the RF-diagram in figure 7.10 taken from actual experiments. It plots the evolution of the frequency of the referent-form relations for a given referent. In other words, all games during a certain period are collected where this particular situation (i.e. a specific referent in the same context) occurred and then the frequencies of all words used to refer to this referent in the same series of games are computed. Similar diagrams can be constructed for the other semiotic relationships. The FR-diagram plots all the referents for a given form, the MF-diagram all the forms for a given meaning, the FMdiagram all the meanings for a given form, the MR-diagram all the referents for a given meaning and the RM-diagram all the meanings for a given referent.

Figure 7.10: This RF-diagram shows the frequency of all forms used for the same referent in 3000 language games, played by a group of 20 embodied situated agents.

The RF-diagram in Figure 7.10 shows the frequency with which certain words were used to communicate a particular situation. We see that in the beginning the word 'desepu' has been dominant, then there is a period of turbulence in which different words compete, but after a while a new word *va* wins the competition and becomes the dominant way to communicate about this situation. Figure 7.11 shows another competition diagram plotting the evolution of the FM-relation, for the word form *va*, in other words the frequencies of all the meanings that co-occurred with the word *va*. We see an early peak when *va* was used in 70 % of the games with the meaning [b 0.3125–0.375], i.e. a particular shade of blue. Then there is a struggle during which additional distinctions (on the red and vpos-channels) are competing for the dominant meaning of *va*. [r 0.0–0.125] finally becomes dominant.

Figure 7.11: This FM-diagram shows the frequencies of each form-meaning pair with the form equal to *va* in a series of 5000 games. A disambiguating situation occurs in game 3000 causing the loss of one meaning of *va*.

These competition diagrams are an important tool to try and make sense of the ontological and lexical evolution taking place in evolving groups of agents as they are playing their language games. Typically we pick a dominating word, for example the word *va* in Figure 7.10, and try to understand why it has become dominant. The FM-diagram for *va* (Figure 7.11) explains part of the story. Three stable meanings for *va* have emerged at around 1000 games: [r 0.0–0.125], [b 0.3125–0.375], and [vpos 0.25–0.5]. They are all equally adequate for distinguishing the object *va* designates, and there are no situations yet that would have forced the disambiguation of *va*. In game 3000, the environment (which is continuously changing in this experiment) produces a scene in which a category which was distinctive for the object designated by *va* is no longer distinctive. The lexicon adapts immediately. Around game 3000 the vpos-based meaning disappears, and the distinction based on red shoots up and becomes dominant.

#### **7.2.4 RMF coherence**

The average frequency of the dominating relations along a particular semiotic dimension is an indication how coherent the community's language system is along that dimension. For example, suppose we want to know the coherence along the meaning-form dimension, in other words whether there are many synonyms in the lexicon or not. For a given series of games, we calculate for each meaning that was indeed used in the series, the frequency of the most common form for that meaning. Then we take the average of these frequencies and this represents the MF-coherence. If all meanings had only one form, the MF-coherence is equal to 1.0. If two forms where used for the same meaning

*7.3 The ideal language*

with equal frequency, MF-coherence is 0.5. When plotting the MF-coherence we can therefore follow the tendency towards an increase or decrease of synonyms.

Examining the coherence along the other dimensions is equally instructive. Studying the coherence along the FM dimension informs us about the degree of ambiguity in the lexicon, because it is based on the average frequency of the preferred meaning for each word. When all word forms have only one meaning, the FM-coherence is 1.0. The more the forms in a language have different meanings with non-zero frequencies, the lower the FM-coherence becomes.

The coherence along the RM dimension informs us about how many possible conceptualisations of the same situation are used by the population. If RM-coherence is high, this means that the population has uniform conceptualisations. For every referent, all agents typically use the same meaning. Usually there are initially many possible ways to conceptualise a scene, but there is a tendency for agents to view the world in a similar way under the influence of language because the scores of the discrimination trees are affected by success of a distinction in language games. I will discuss this in more detail in the final section of this chapter.

The inverse relation (MR, between meanings and referents) tracks the frequency with which certain situations are covered by specific meanings. It informs us about the generality of the categories available to the agents, assuming that all agents statistically encounter the same sort of environments. If a particular meaning can pick out many possible referents in many contexts, this meaning must be abstract and the agents must have managed to develop a lexicon that is not tied up completely to specific situations.

## **7.3 The ideal language**

Complex adaptive systems show a tendency to optimise their internal functioning despite the absence of a global overall control center. For example, each species in a single ecology tends to become better in exploiting its niche and the global system moves towards a balanced equilibrium where different species play different roles in a complex ecological web.7 This book explores the idea that language is a complex adaptive system like a natural ecology, which is shaped and reshaped by the local interactions of autonomous agents without a central controlling agency regulating what linguistic conventions should be adopted. We have seen that in computer simulations and experiments with robotic agents a shared communication system emerges, but in how far is this system optimal?8

#### **7.3.1 Total coherence**

A first desirable property of a language system is perhaps that it is totally coherent along all semiotic dimensions. In terms of semiotic landscapes, this means that the graph consists of unconnected triangles. Each object in a specific context has a unique meaning,

7 See examples in Margulis (1991).

8 See for the discussion on whether languages ever can be said to optimise: Kirby (1999).

each meaning has a unique form and picks out a unique referent, and each form has a unique meaning and hence a unique referent as well. The coherence along all possible dimensions is then always 1.0. Given such a system, the agents would not need to consider different hypotheses while speaking or listening, there would never be any confusion, and a new agent learning the language would never be confronted with different uses of the same word.

Such an ideal language has been a dream of many philosophers, including Descartes and Leibniz, but the investigations reported here show clearly that it is not attainable.9 A language must be open to the expression of new meanings because the communicative objectives and the environments which are the subject of communication keep changing. Hence synonymy (incoherence along the MF dimension) is unavoidable because words are created by some agents not knowing that words already exist in the population for the same meaning. In addition, one agent may "wrongly" infer that a certain word has a particular meaning due to perceptual anomalies, even though the same word had already another meaning in the lexicon. Word-meaning pairs that thus arise may start to propagate in the population and actually supersede the "original" word-meaning pairs.

Ambiguity (incoherence along the FM dimension) is unavoidable as well for similar reasons. The same situation can often be conceptualised in more than one way and so an agent guessing the meaning of an unknown word or trying to make sense of a word in a particular context may easily derive another meaning than the one used by the speaker. Perceptual anomalies further aggravate the risk that a certain form becomes associated with another meaning by the hearer, as we have seen in some grounded example games earlier on.

Different conceptualisations of the world (incoherence along the RM and MR dimensions) are even harder to avoid because every agent develops its own ontologies independently and without any direct feedback from the other agents. The ideal language system is not only impossible to attain for autonomous agents engaged in grounded language games, it would be very inefficient to store and use as well because new words and meanings would be required for every new situation ever encountered. The larger the lexicon, the harder the task of a language learner to acquire it. So there is a trade off between coherence and expressibility. This is why natural languages constantly try to recruit existing words to keep down the repertoire of forms that have to be stored and hence learned.

#### **7.3.2 Communicative success despite incoherence**

A grounded language system cannot be fully coherent. This implies that communication among autonomous embodied agents can only work if their internal architectures are capable to handle incoherence. Of course, incoherence may not necessarily impinge on communicative success. Alternative conceptualisations may be compatible with the same situations. Agents may not even realise that their language systems are different because even though their words have different meanings these meanings may always pick out the same topic. Thus the RMF-landscape in Figure 7.9 leads to total success for communicating situation2. Even if a speaker uses 'tisame' to mean [gray-0.0,0.25] and

9 The history of this search for such an ideal language is discussed by Eco (1997).

*7.4 Damping synonymy and ambiguity*

the hearer understands 'tisame' to mean [hpos-0.5,0.75], they still have communicative success. The goal of the language game is to find the referent. It does not matter whether the meanings are the same. The agents cannot even know which meaning the other one uses because they have no access to each other's internal states.

The architecture of the agents in the Talking Heads experiment has been carefully designed so that incoherence can be handled. The context is at every level strongly taken into account. When producing an utterance, the meaning of a word is partly determined by whether that meaning makes sense in the specific context of the language game. This makes it possible to handle ambiguity. To handle synonymy, agents store several words in their lexicons so that they can understand more words than the ones they prefer themselves. Agents maintain different ways to conceptualise reality so that they can apply conceptualisations used by others even though they would not prefer these themselves.

The agents behave in their own selfish interest to maximise success in the game. They increase the score of the word-meaning pairs that yielded success and decrease those that resulted in failure so that next time around they are more likely to use that wordmeaning pair. But a side effect of this behavior is that synonymy and ambiguity get damped. Success depends on use in the rest of the population. The more agents use a word, the more it will have success, the higher the scores will be, and the more it will be used. The global effect is that the language becomes more coherent without a central coordinator.

## **7.4 Damping synonymy and ambiguity**

To conclude this chapter, I now discuss in more detail an example of this kind of semiotic dynamics as gleaned from an actual experiment with twenty Talking Heads, taking turns to materialise themselves in two robotic bodies at a single physical site. The agents have only R, G, B, and gray-scale channels. This case study illustrates how the tools introduced in the previous section help us to make sense of the very complex lexical evolution spontaneously arising in the system. We have set up the experiment in such a way that the agents first see a limited set of objects. Then we have progressively added new situations to the environment (by pasting new figures on the white board or reconfiguring existing figures) and studied the impact on the lexicons and ontologies of the agents.10

Figure 7.12 plots the global result of the experiment for 35,000 games. It shows the progressive increase in environmental complexity (after every 5000 games) and the average communicative and discriminative success in the game. During the final 15,000 games, no new objects were introduced.

We see clearly that the agents manage to bootstrap a successful lexicon from scratch in the first 1000 games. Success then drops every time the environment increases in complexity but regains as the agents invent new words or create new meanings. Progressively it is less and less difficult to handle increased environmental complexity be-

10 These experiments work were done in strong collaboration with Frederic Kaplan, see for example Steels & Kaplan (1999).

Figure 7.12: The graph shows the communicative and discriminatory success for a series of 35000 language games played by a group of 20 Talking Heads. The environment has progressively been made more complex.

cause distinctions are already available to cope with the novel situations, words are less ambiguous, and the lexicon is covering more and more meanings.

#### **7.4.1 The story of** *fepi*

Only looking at macroscopic measures like communicative success hides away the interesting rich lexical dynamics that unfolds in the population. Let me examine just one word, *fepi*. By looking at the FR-diagram, we see that this word is used consistently for identifying two objects (*O3* and *O5*) in a certain set of contexts (Figure 7.13).

We can see the meanings of *fepi*, by inspecting its FM-diagram (Figure 7.14). The dominant meaning of *fepi* is a particular shade of green [g 0.25–0.5]. There are some other competing meanings (including [gray 0.25–0.3125]) but most of them are hardly ever used. We observe clearly the tendency for ambiguity to get damped.

What about synonymy? Let us look at the MF-diagram of [g 0.25–0.5], so that we can see whether there are any other words in use for expressing the same meaning (Figure 7.15). *fepi* has indeed emerged as dominant for this meaning, but this has not been without an intense struggle. The tendency for synonymy to get damped is clearly present. Even though the lexicon occasionally destabilises, the lateral inhibition and the positive feedback loop between use and success causes self-organised MF-coherence. There is however something curious going on. In the early phases *xu* was dominant. Why did it destabilise and how has *fepi* has managed to become the dominant expression for [g 0.25–0.5]?

Figure 7.13: FR-diagram showing the frequencies of the objects referred to by the word *fepi*. *fepi* is consistently used for *O3* as well as *O5*.

Figure 7.14: FM-diagram showing the different meanings of *fepi*. One meaning [g 0.25– 0.5] dominates.

Figure 7.15: MF-diagram showing the different words circulating in the population for expressing the category [g 0.25–0.5]. First *xu* dominates and then *fepi* wins the competition after an intense struggle.

#### **7.4.2 The story of** *xu*

When inspecting in more detail the game traces, we see that *fepi* is created in game 328 by agent-3, playing the role of speaker, in order to refer to object *O3* using the meaning [g 0.25–0.5]. Agent-19, the hearer in the same game, acquires the same meaning for [g 0.25–0.5]. In one sense, we could say that agent-19 has learned this meaning of *fepi* from agent-3 but that is not entirely accurate. Agent-19 has constructed a possible meaning for *fepi* and this happened to be the same as the one used by agent-3, but this is partly accidental. Agents only indirectly learn the language from others. They construct a language which is compatible with the language used by others. Coherence among the individual language systems occurs through the positive feedback between language use and communicative success.

*fepi* entered into the lexicon to refer to *O3*, but we see from the RF diagram for *O3* (Figure 7.16) that *xu* was already well established for *O3* and initially *fepi* had no success at all. So the puzzle is still there, how did *fepi* manage to overtake *xu*?

Let us look at the different meanings of *xu* on a magnified scale by inspecting the FM-diagram of *xu* (Figure 7.17). Only the first 10,000 games are shown because after that *xu* is no longer used. In the first 5000 games, *xu* has the same dominant meaning as *fepi*, namely [g 0.25–0.5]. There are some other meanings associated with *xu*, which are all effective to conceptualise *O3*.

Figure 7.16: RF-diagram showing the different words being used for identifying *O3*. Initially *xu* dominates

Figure 7.17: FM-diagram showing the different meanings of *xu*. After game 5000, the meaning of *xu* becomes unclear and the word falls in disrespute.

#### **7.4.3 The entry of** *O3*

The mystery is unveiled by looking at what happened when *O3*, a new object, entered the environment around game 5000. The word *xu* now not only picks out *O3* in certain contexts but *O5* as well. Hence games where both objects are occurring fail and consequently the association between *xu* and [g 0.25–0.5] is weakening. Closer examination reveals that *O5*'s green value is a bit lower (in the range [0.25,0375]) than that of *O3* (which is in the range [0.375,0.5]), so that a more refined distinction on the G-channel is necessary if both objects occur in the same context.

Figure 7.18: RF-diagram showing the different words used for *O5*. Initially a word *rimebi* dominates. It destabilises and *fepi* takes over.

As seen from the RF-diagram in Figure 7.16, *xu* is no longer used for *O3*. Instead the word 'pasi' comes to dominate. 'pasi' has indeed the more specific meaning [g 0.375– 0.5] which is only applicable to *O3*, not to *O5*. At the same time we see from the RFdiagram for *O5* (Figure 7.18) that the word 'rimebi' initially dominates for designating *O5*. 'rimebi' has the more specific meaning [g 0.25–0.375] which is not applicable to *O3*. The more general word *xu* is still useful in some contexts where the refined distinction is not necessary (for example where either *O3* or *O5* is present but not both). So we would expect that *xu* continues to exist. However this is not the case. *xu* loses out completely and its role is taken over by *fepi*.

*7.5 Rousseau's paradox*

Understanding why this is the case tells us a great detail about the kind of hidden semiotic dynamics that takes place. *xu* loses its strength because (1) it fails in games where its meaning is not distinctive enough so that its score goes down, and (2) because there are other meanings competing with *xu* which do not have strong alternatives and are therefore less prone to failure. This is notably the case for *fepi*. *fepi* carries the more general meaning of green and does not have competitors. It therefore overtakes *xu*.

This example shows many things. Clearly lexical dynamics can be very complicated, despite the fact that the underlying mechanisms are relatively simple. Complexity comes partly from the complexity of the environment that continues to challenge the agents with novel , and partly from the internal complexity the semiotic dynamics spontaneously generates. There are strong tendencies in the agents' lexical systems towards FM and MF coherence, in other words towards shared lexicons. These tendencies are not due to a central controlling authority which has a global view of the lexicon and dictates to the agents what they should do but because incoherent form-meaning pairs do not resist when the environment changes. As we have seen, the word *fepi* could overtake *xu*, because *xu* had alternative meanings that caused failures in novel situations and *fepi* did not. *fepi* had a higher coherence and therefore survived, even though *xu* was used more often but with an ambiguous meaning.

## **7.5 Rousseau's paradox**

The self-organised coherence of lexicons is an important outcome of the experiments, but what about the other semiotic dimension, the relation between situations and their conceptualisation? In how far do the agents use the same conceptualisations of reality in the same situations (RM-coherence) and in how far do they pick out the same topics given the same meaning (MR coherence). Many different ways to conceptualise reality may exist side by side and if each one can be expressed, it would lead to successful communication. So there is less a clear pressure to make the RM-coherence increase. The advantage of high RM-coherence is that the agents are more uniform in their behavior, so that fewer hypotheses need to be considered and the acquisition of the lexicon by virgin agents is easier.

#### **7.5.1 Universality versus relativism**

This raises a fundamental question, which has been heavily debated throughout the history of philosophy, namely in how far have different languages different ontologies and in how far does the use of a language influence ontological coherence in a population. From one point of view, words are seen as labeling existing (innate or learned) categories, and so the problem of learning a lexicon consists in learning the association between unknown labels and known internal categories.11 On the other hand, ethnologists and linguists studying non-European languages almost invariably arrive at the conclusion

11 "The speed and precision of vocabulary acquisition leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts prior to experience with language, and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already part of his or her conceptual apparatus." p.21. in Chomsky (1987).

that there are profound differences between languages, not simply in which words they use but also in which way they conceptualise reality. This implies that there is a kind of co-evolution between language and meaning.12

Here is a seemingly trivial example of the interaction between language and meaning. In French, the second singular person pronoun ('you') has two forms: 'tu' and 'vous'. Textbooks say that the first is colloquial and the second form is polite. A speaker is therefore required to categorise the social relation between himself and the hearer, which he is not forced to do in English. But polite/colloquial is too simplistic to capture the underlying usages. The categorisation of the speech situation is quite subtle, possibly incorporating age differences, professional status, class differences, pragmatic context, speaking style, etc. Someone learning to speak French must not only learn that 'you' has two forms but also what the subtle distinctions are between the situations where you use one or the other. If you think learning this distinction is difficult, just consider Japanese, where there are dozens of words for 'I', some of them listed in Table 7.9.

Table 7.9: Words for 'I' in Japanese

Here is another example which is more related to the perceptually grounded distinctions we are studying here. To categorise space, a viewer typically imposes a frame of reference on the scene before him and categorises regions and positions in terms of this frame of reference. For example, standing in front of a chair we could say in English *the table is to the right of the chair*, where *to the right of* designates an area to the right within the frame of reference relative to axes emanating from the observer. This seems the most natural and simplest way to categorise space and it is used by the Talking Heads when they expand the hpos channel. However, there are quite a few languages which impose an absolute frame of reference, see Levinson & Wilkins (2006). For example, the Tenejapans from Chiapas, Mexico speak a Mayan language known as Tzeltal. They live in a mountaneous region that is generally sloping north-northwest. They use this regional characteristic to introduce an absolute frame of reference with three distinctions: uphill, downhill, and across. Standing in front of the chair, they would literally say something like 'standing at its uphill chair the table', in other words, 'the table is uphill from the chair'. The spatial categories left, right, front, back, etc. simply do not exist in Tzeltal. Something that is *to the left* from the viewpoint of English could be 'downhill', 'uphill', or 'across' depending on its absolute position. If we want to translate *to the left of* in

12 The best known representative of this position is Whorf (1956). See for a wider discussion Lee (1996).

*7.5 Rousseau's paradox*

Tzeltal, we first have to conceptualise the global reference frame that is valid in the situation being described, and only then we can choose whether 'uphill', 'downhill', or 'across' are appropriate translations. It could be argued that these differences are purely due to differences in lexicalisation. But this is not so. An absolute frame of reference has not only an impact on language but also deep implications for other cognitive tasks. Psychologists have invented non-verbal tasks where speakers of Tzeltal make other spatial inferences than Europeans. Ignoring such profound cultural differences is therefore a sure recipe for disastrous misunderstandings.

The degree of sharing (or non-sharing) of an ontology in a group raises the paradox, first expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Language requires a sufficiently shared categorisation of reality, otherwise no communication is possible. But, if every language employs its own categorisation (even if there are large overlaps), how is a particular individual entering a language community supposed to know the categorisation implicit in his or her language? It is clear that language helps foster shared meaning because meaning is transmitted through language, for example when a speaker explains the meaning of a word to a hearer. On the other hand, successful language interaction already requires at least some shared meaning, how could the system otherwise bootstrap itself? So we have a chicken and egg situation, a causal circularity that somehow must be broken.

#### **7.5.2 Ontological coherence**

The Talking Heads experiment shows a way to resolve this paradox. Different agents develop their own ontology in a selectionist fashion, using the growth and pruning dynamics discussed in Chapter 4. Because there is some randomness in the growth process and because different agents see different cases in which other channels may be salient, it is highly unlikely that they all end up with exactly the same set of categories, even though agents operating in the same environment with a similar sensori-motor apparatus will develop similar distinctions.

On the other hand, the coupling between the conceptual and lexical layer discussed in the previous chapter causes a strong interaction between the two. Those distinctions whose lexicalisations are the most successful are preferred, and the scores of categorisers is influenced by the outcome of the games in which they were used. This structural coupling causes a progressive coordination of the ontology and the lexicon of the agents, even though ontologies will never be completely identical.

Figure 7.19 shows the result of some experiments focusing on ontological coherence (i.e. RM-coherence). The agents reach a close to 100 % discriminatory success, and coherence climbs to 75 %. Multiple solutions are possible, and so there is no reason why the agents would have completely convergent ontologies.

A more fine-grained way to visualise the emerging coherence between the agents' ontologies is through a coherence web (see Figure 7.20). There is an axis for each agent as well as a line emanating from the center of the web. Let *a1* and *a2* be two agents, then *a1*'s line intersects with *a2*'s axis at the level of coherence between *a1* and *a2*. For example, if *a1* and *a2* have a 50 % ontological coherence, then *a1*'s line intersects *a2*'s

Figure 7.19: This figure shows the discrimination success as well as the ontological (RM) coherence for a series of 5000 discrimination games in a group of 10 agents.

axis at point 0.5. The intersection between an agent's line and its own axis represents the average coherence of this agent with respect to all the other agents. When there is little coherence, the lines cluster around the center of the cobweb. As coherence increases, the lines approach more and more the edges of the diagram. If all lines end up exactly on the edges, there is complete coherence. Similar coherence webs can be constructed for the other semiotic relations studied earlier.

The evolution in the coherence webs in Figure 7.20 shows clearly that the agents are coordinating their ontologies, despite direct feedback about the meaning of a game. Feedback only comes from the pointing through the external world. More experiments need to be done to with more channels so that the set of possible alternative conceptualisations is sufficiently significant to investigate the co-evolution of language and meaning more precisely. Nevertheless, the experiments show that ontologies can be coordinated without needing to be innate.

## **7.6 Conclusions**

The experiments reported in this chapter have demonstrated that the various mechanisms introduced in earlier chapters not only work in computer simulations but also in experiments with embodied situated agents. The grounding of language games in physical reality introduces perceptual and behavioral anomalies which may cause failures and additional ambiguities in the lexical systems of the agents. However the mechanisms introduced before, particularly the forces damping synonymy and ambiguity, still prove to be adequate to lead the population towards a coherent successful language system.

The lexical and ontological evolution observed even in small populations of agents

quickly becomes too complicated to investigate by hand. I therefore introduce a number of tools, such as the semiotic landscape, the coherence diagrams, and the coherence web. We clearly need more of these tools and we need to study additional properties of emergent lexicons, such as the semantic relations between the words and how they may evolve.

Figure 7.20: Coherence diagrams visualising the coherence of ontologies in a group of 10 agents for a series of 1000 discrimination games. Lines emanate from the center when there is close to 0 % coherence. They approach the edges in the case of 100 % ontological coherence.

## **Part II**

## **Installations and experiments**

## **8 The first series (1999)**

The ideas and results that have been discussed in Part I of the present volume were based on results obtained in idealised conditions. Computer simulations are able to test the validity of the basic algorithms, but simulations are still theoretical in nature. It is well known that technologies can only become a reality after experiments have been carried out in open-ended real world conditions. Nobody would want to fly an airplane that has only been tested in computer simulations.

We did the same for the Talking Heads experiments and this was a huge step. Many more people had to get get involved: for making the code more robust, setting up the teleportation infrastructure, and installing and maintaining the physical installations in different countries. The mechanisms about language evolution discussed in Part I of this book did not significantly change. On the contrary, they received solid experimental confirmation. At the same time, we learned a huge amount about the dependencies between these mechanisms and the environments in which agents use them. We also learned a great deal about running software agents in an open infrastructure distributed over the entire globe. Furthermore we learned a lot about the interaction between humans and agents ranging from enthusiastic participation and enjoyment to nasty attacks by English hackers, set on destroying the experiment.

This chapter provides more detail on the first main experiment that took place in the summer of 1999 as part of the Laboratorium exhibition in Antwerp. The next chapter documents follow up experiments that took place within the context of the N01SE exhibition in Cambridge and London and at several other locations.

## **8.1 The Laboratorium exhibition**

The Laboratorium exhibition was a major artistic event in Europe during the summer of 1999 organised by Bruno Verbergt of an organisation called *Antwerpen Open*. It was one of the first exhibitions that put so much emphasis on art as a research activity and on profound interactions between art and science. Participants included both scientists and science historians such as Peter Galison, Bruno Latour, Israel Rosenfield and Isabelle Stengers, as well as architects such as Rem Koolhaas and artists with an affinity for research such as Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Gabriel Orozco, Carsten Höller, Panamarenko, Lawrence Weiner and others. The exhibition was visited by 8000 people.

The introduction to the catalog edited by curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden1 stated the objectives as follows:

1 The catalog of the Laboratorium exhibition was published as Obrist & Vanderlinden (1999).

#### *8 The first series (1999)*

Laboratorium is an interdisciplinary project in which the scientific laboratory and the artist's studio are explored on the basis of their various concepts within the different disciplines. How can we attempt to bridge the gap between the specialized vocabulary of science, art and the general interest of the audience, between the expertise of skilled practitioners and the concerns and preconcepts of the interested audience?

Laboratorium will search the limits and possibilities of the places where knowledge and culture are made. Throughout the summer we will establish within the city of Antwerpen networks, fluctuating between highly specialized work by scientists, artists, dancers, and writers. "Working places" where the participants communicate their findings on the "work in progress". Also the scientific laboratories in Antwerpen will be involved in the initiative.

Laboratorium started as a discussion that involves questions such as: What is the meaning of laboratories? What is the meaning of experiments? When do experiments become public and when does the result of an experiment reach public consensus? Is rendering public what happens inside the laboratory of the scientist and the studio of the artist a contradiction in terms? These and other questions are being offered in this interdisciplinary project that starts with the "workplace" where the artists and the scientists experiment and work freely.

The event was part of the activities, celebrating the famous Antwerp painter Anthony van Dyck born 400 years earlier. In preparation of the exhibition a series of discussions were held between Carsten Höller, Bruno Latour, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Luc Steels and Barbara Vanderlinden. These discussions helped to shape the general concept of the exhibition and the selection of the artists and scientists who would participate. Excerpts appeared in the exhibition catalog and other publication fora, Obrist (2003).

The exhibition took place in two locations: the photography museum in Antwerp, which was the main location, and an annex occupying several floors in a high rise office building close to the central station (the so called President's Building). The Photography Museum Exhibition featured work by several well known artists, architects and scientists. The annex featured the Talking Heads experiment as well as work by artists Joseph Grigely and Matt Mullican and science philosopher Isabelle Stengers, who had set up a reconstruction of Galileo's famous experiments. There were also a number of public presentations under the heading "The Theatre of Proof", organised by Bruno Latour. The catalog was designed by Bruce Mau and his team.

In addition to the installation at the exhibition in Antwerp itself, there were two additional external sites for the Talking Heads experiment operating within the same time frame: The Paris site at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and the Brussels site at the Free University (Vrije Universiteit) of Brussels.

Months of preparation and testing took place before we attempted to go "live" and public. Once this happened, work continued frantically to shake out bugs, get the semiotic dynamics right and then maintain the general communication infrastructure and the ongoing interactions with participants. The fascinating email correspondence (see section 8.3) shows that most of the difficulties initially came from running the agent

#### *8.2 The installation*

Figure 8.1: Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Luc Steels during the opening of the Laboratorium Exhibition in Antwerp, summer 1999.

teleportation infrastructure. The reader has to keep in mind that this was late nineties, when large-scale uploading and downloading, cloud computing, agent architectures, etc. were totally in their infancy.

The real heros of the first Talking Heads series were Angus McIntyre, who was the chief architect of the agent teleportation infrastructure, Fréderic Kaplan, who kept an eye on the Paris site in particular, Joris Van Looveren, who looked after the Brussels and Antwerp sites, and Mario Campanella, an aeronautical engineer from Brazil who had shown up at the last minute to help keep track of the Antwerp installation. I focused on the overall dynamics of the experiment, which initially was certainly not going the way it should, and on handling the contact with the exhibition organisers and the press. Silvere Tajan, Alexis Agahi and Holger Kenn helped to create the telecommunication infrastructure.

## **8.2 The installation**

The installation in Antwerp was announced as a "Laboratory for Cognitive Robotics and Teleportation" (Steels 1999). It featured various rooms as shown in the layout in Figure 8.2. The rooms had different functions:

1. The central room which was visible on entering the space contained the experiment itself, i.e. the two cameras mounted on tripods, the computers driving them, the screen with geometric figures, and a projection of what went on. The activities of the agents were audible through a narration.

#### *8 The first series (1999)*

A typical example of the kind of images that the cameras picked up are shown in Figure 8.4. To play a game, the agent had to find a sufficiently delineated group of objects and each object had to exceed a minimal size. Initially quite complex configurations were put on the white board but this made it very difficult for agents to find a coherent group and to develop good concepts for referring to the topic. The right image in Figure 8.4 provides clear examples of up, down, left and right, different colors, and also opportunities to use multiple words (such as *red bottom*).

A typical example of an interaction is shown in Figure 8.5. The speaker (called "rubber", an agent created and named by a user) has selected the blue object at the bottom left of the screen. We see the discrimination trees of the agent at that point and the data for each of the objects recognised. The coordinates of the respective objects (scaled within the coordinate system of the captured image) are (0.0,1.0) for the blue object, (1.0, 0.96)

Figure 8.2: Layout of the "Laboratory for Cognitive Robotics and Teleportation" at the Laboratorium exhibition in Antwerp.

Figure 8.3: A single Talking Head at the Paris site. In the background we see (bottom) the display with an image that the agent picked up, (on top of that) a screen displaying the processed image and the discrimination trees, and to the right the loudspeaker broadcasting the speech output of the agent.

Figure 8.4: Examples of images picked up by the cameras. The chosen topic was signalled by drawing a bounding box around it. During experimentation, it was found that configurations such as in the right image led to more stable performance.

#### *8 The first series (1999)*

for the red one, and (0.42, 0.0) for the green one. The values are displayed as hp (horizontal position), vp (vertical position), h (height), w (width), a (area), r (red), g (green), y (yellow), b (blue), l (lightness). The blue object is chosen as the topic and the value on the blue channel has the most discriminative power, although there are other possibilities. There are three competing words for naming blue: *Xagadude*, *Nibidesu*, and *Tetipi*. None of them have a score higher than 0 and so a random choice of *Xagadude* is made.

The hearer (called "me") perceives an image which is slightly different from the one seen by the speaker. Also the discrimination trees built up so far by this agent are different from the ones used by the speaker. The hearer does not know the word, so the game fails. After the speaker has then pointed to the topic, the hearer conceptualises and guesses that the meaning of this word is 'blue' because that is also for him the most discriminating feature of the topic (which has coordinates 0.0, 1.0) compared to the other objects in the context.

The experiment had also a presence on the web, designed by Angus McIntyre. Anyone could log in on the Talking Heads website, create an agent with a given name, and launch it on a tour of the various physical sites. There was also a forum on which users could discuss the experiment as it was progressing, a hall of fame for the agents that were the best communicators, and an overview of the lexicon that had formed so far. The website allowed inspection of what was happening at each site (Figure 8.6): Users could check which agents were waiting there to play a game, and what the current game was about. It also displayed statistics about the communicative success and agent activity at each site. The site is no longer operational due to changes to the underlying software but some remnants can be visited here: https://ai.vub.ac.be/talking-heads/

An example of how the web interface displayed a single game is shown in Figure 8.7. There are two agents: Antonusius is the speaker and Zelebot is the hearer. The green object has been chosen as topic and correctly recognised by the hearer using the word *kazozo*. The meaning of the word was not visible through the interface because we wanted users to learn themselves the language of the agents.

## **8.3 Start up of the experiment**

Once the physical installation at the Antwerp site was completed, work focused on getting the experiment itself up and running. It is interesting and instructive to look at some snippets of the email correspondence during the first weeks. The despair when trying to cope with the unavoidable problems but also the excitement as a language began to emerge shines through. The English humor of Angus McIntyre was a welcome antidote to all the stress. The correspondence reprinted here is a small selection but also necessary fragmentary because a lot of communication took place face-to-face or through the telephone, as email was not always possible.

Game 1140 Thu-24-02-2000 5:20 PM

Figure 8.5: Top: Source image, conceptualisation, and word choice of the speaker. Bottom: Source image, parsing and interpretation of the hearer.

Figure 8.6: The Talking Heads website main interface. Users could create and manage their own agents and inspect what was happening at each site. Here 12 agents located at the Brussels site are listed.

Figure 8.7: Example of an interaction that took part in Antwerp. This game was a success. The agents recognised the same set of objects and the meaning of *kazozo* was effective in finding the same topic.

#### *8 The first series (1999)*

We pick up the email correspondence on June 23, 1999 when the first experiments are taking place to try and make language games at the three sites possible and allow the scheduling and activation of agents.

### **23 June 1999**

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: Brussels is back At 9:04 pm +0200 23.06.99, Joris Van Looveren wrote: >Brussels is officially back on line. I forgot to make sure that there >were no agents here before I launched it, so don't be surprised if it >turns out that some agents have suddenly been cloned :) I don't think agents can be cloned; 'headnet' will probably just say "Oh, back so soon?" and overwrite existing definitions. This may lead to inconsistencies if two copies of an agent are out and about at the same time ... Brussels is active, which is good. Paris appears to have gone to sleep, either because the lights are out, or because it's past its pre-defined bedtime. Still, the Babel software still seems to be running with nothing more than the usual email process errors. >- The machine is still fast enough to do other work. The only > thing that is a bit annoying is that it stalls when images > are being grabbed (read: sent over the bus). There's a lot of data moving over a slow line, and evidently the MacOS is giving it priority to prevent dropped frames when doing video capture. >- Since there is no sound, it is blazingly fast compared to > the Antwerp installation (2-3 games per minute or so) Speech and camera motion are the big slow downs. This means that we're not under a lot of pressure to optimize the agent code, as the agents can do all their discriminations faster than we'll ever be able to drive the cameras (until we try using the little EVI-G21's, which only have to move a little CCD unit rather than a whole camera assembly, and apparently track very quickly indeed). I've announced the site to a handful of links pages (Peter Norvig's AI links collection, Chris Bogart's Constructed Languages page, the NASA real robots page - links to all these sites are under 'background' on our site). I haven't yet done a massive submit of the site to the big search engines or

announcement sites; I suggest that we let traffic build slowly so we can find out what we can handle. A

#### **24 June 1999**

The (faster) machines that were planned are now available, so that a switch has to be made while the experiment is already running.

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============

From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: 'headnet' now running on new PII 400 server. Silvere and Alexis have installed Linux and the headnet software on the new 400Mhz Pentium II server, and I've done the DNS switch (and updated /etc/hosts, and csl.zone, and sony.rev, and sony.zone, and killed half a dozen in.named processes, and killed squid, and restarted squid, and killed squid, and restarted squid, and killed squid, and deleted squid's cache, and restarted squid, and flushed my Netscape cache, and flushed everyone else's Netscape cache, and flushed the Netscape cache of eight dozen people in Australia who I've never met, and individually inspected and edited every packet on the Internet to make sure that 'headnet.csl.sony.fr' now points to the new box).

The result of this is that 'headnet.csl.sony.fr' should now get you the P400 server, and 'headnet-dev.csl.sony.fr' should get you the old 200Mhz Vectra, which can be recognised because it has the words 'test site' in the banner that appears at the top of the page.

With luck, the change should be transparent and you shouldn't need to do anything. You should however check to make sure that your agents are going to the right server, however, and that when your browser looks for 'headnet', that it gets the correct machine. If your Babel server accesses 'headnet' via a cacheing proxy server, you may also need to ask your sysop to clear the server's cache and restart it. Enjoy A

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ To: Joris Van Looveren<EMAIL_ADDRESS>From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: Brussels 2pm At 2:00 pm +0200 24.06.99, Joris Van Looveren wrote: >We're planing to go to Antwerp in 1 hour. There is no telephone there, >so we will communicate by email ... We're thinking of clearing the >database around 4 pm. ... do you want to do it from Paris ? You do it. At 3:55pm, I'll kick all the agents off 'paris' and pause it. When I see headnet has been cleared, I'll restart 'paris' and make some new agents. I'll upload the changed TH website with the direct links to 'headnet' at the same time. A

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Things to do in Antwerp when you're head(net) ... There seems to be some problem with the changeover of the machines. What's happened is that the new address for 'headnet' (<IP_ADDRESS>, which is to say the PII 400, rather than <IP_ADDRESS>, which is the Vectra formerly known as 'headnet' but now represented by an unpronounceable symbol that means 'headnet-dev') has not yet propagated through the DNS as far as Belgium. So Antwerp (yeah! welcome to the net!) is sending its agents to 'headnet-dev', rather than 'headnet'. There's no great problem here as far as testing your installation goes, except that 'paris' is pointing at the new 'headnet' and 'brussels' is apparently dead, so you won't be seeing any foreign agents. In theory, if you reboot, the DNS results cached on the Macintosh should go away, forcing a re-lookup which ought to get the correct values. If that doesn't work, you could try taking the MacTCP DNR file which lives in the System Folder \*out\* of

the System Folder and then rebooting. And if that doesn't work, we just have to be patient and wait for the changes to propagate. You could also consider entering the address of 'headnet' as dotted IP (<IP_ADDRESS>) in the network configuration dialog. A

From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: Database cleared At 5:47 pm +0200 24.06.99, Joris Van Looveren wrote: >The databases have just been cleared. You can create new agents now. >Brussels might be down for some more time, so check if it's up before you >send any agents there. OK. I notice there are bugs in the server code which cause it to generate scads of errors when the database is empty, but those should clear. I've restarted 'paris', and I'm now going to make some agents to send there. Antwerp is showing up on 'headnet', and the error messages strewn all over the site should go away when we get some data into the database. When it begins to look a little more solid, I'll upload the changed pages on 'talking-heads', and then we'll really be live. A

From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: Webcam At 6:28 pm +0200 24.06.99, Joris Van Looveren wrote: >The Antwerp webcam is on-line: I've added a link from the Antwerp page on the main site, and I've also added a link in the descriptive text about the Antwerp server which appears on the 'server overview' page. I actually saw one of you - Fred? - through the Antwerp webcam a moment ago. > Also, the Antwerp and Brussels site are up 'permanently', > so can send agents to them.  The server seems to be acquiring consistency. I'm off home now. If you need me to come back and kick the server, call me on: +33-1-42-78-xx-xx Bye, A

#### *8 The first series (1999)*

### **25 June 1999**

The different sites and the teleportation infrastructure are now running but there are still basic problems stemming from hardware and software glitches.

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 05:13:55 EST From: "frederic kaplan"<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: First night The talking-heads in Antwerp have passed the night OK... 34 agents 18 users... It goes fast It seems that Paris and Brussels are not playing anymore ? Fred.

From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: Antwerp & Brussels live! At 10:52 am +0200 25.06.99, Joris Van Looveren wrote: >I got e-mails from Antwerp and Brussels that they resumed normally this >morning. So they both survived their first night on the job! Paris seems to be still ticking along. One thing I notice is that it's quite easy for agents to 'pool' on one particular server at the expense of others. The more agents you have on any one server, the longer it takes for each agent to get through its assigned 50 games or whatever. So servers with many agents tend to stay occupied, and others which are waiting to receive agents can often stand empty waiting for the agents to play out their games on the crowded servers. It's probably a good idea to have a few agents (either the ones owned by 'adm' or your own agents) set up to make round trips, playing five games here, five games there, and so on. Long routes of small numbers of games rather than short routes involving many games is probably the way to load balance and prevent servers drying up. > ... the database is still accessible through a simple URL, >without any protection (password). I think since headnet has gone >public, it would be a good idea to change this ... The same idea had occurred to me. I'll look into that (trans: I'll try to find the piece of paper on which I wrote down the root password to 'headnet' and, if I find it, I'll set up an .htaccess file to keep strangers out).

I've told a few friends of mine about it, and the response so far has been generally positive, although Sylvia - Luc's proofreader - apparently has some reservations about the usability of the site. Hmm. News update. A friend of mine, who shall be nameless, sent down an agent with route: 'brussels paris antwerp' As I predicted a few days ago, this will (and did) cause a LISP-level error. I patched the route by hand and then made the mistake of trying to use MCL's rather flaky 'Restart frame' option to go on. At first this seemed to have worked, but about one game later things went bad and the whole machine locked. One of the three agents then on the server managed to get out just seconds ahead of the meltdown, but two more were caught on the server and are now in limbo. I've edited the database for one of them to try to resurrect it, and if that works, I'll try to revive the other as well. I'll also write a quick bit of code to do route-checking to try to make sure that this doesn't happen again. A

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============

From: Angus McIntyre<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: The Lazarus Syndrome When a Babel server falls over and agents get lost, it's possible to restore them to life by going onto Headnet's 'admin' page and editing the agent's entry in the 'THAgent' table. Basically, if you reset the 'isonserver' field to 1 (it will be 0 when the agent's away), the agent should spontaneously reappear on headnet and then move off to wherever it was meant to go. There will be inconsistencies in the database - 'headnet' will remember all the words that the agent used before the crash, but the agent's own memory is reset to what it was when it left 'headnet' - but with luck they shouldn't be too serious. By the way, there's a bug in the 'headnet' software with respect to routes; there's a finite limit on the field length for the 'route' field. If you make a route that's too long, it gets truncated, so you can have an agent whose route goes: ... paris 10 bruss The agent will complete its games on 'paris' and then go into stasis waiting for a server called 'bruss' to pick it up. A patch for this would probably be nice to have at some point. A

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ From: Holger Kenn<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Alpha box in Antwerpen gone... Hi ! The alpha box in Antwerpen is gone. Please somebody reboot it ASAP, or we won't have a connection to Antwerpen anymore... Holger p.s.: To reboot: Disconnect Printer. Switch alpha box off. Switch on again. Wait about 5 Minutes. Reconnect printer. Holger

#### **28 June 1999**

After the basic hardware appeared to be operational, attention turned to the actual behavior of the emergent language system. Initial results are not very encouraging.

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ From: Luc Steels<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: paris site I just examined the Paris site a bit. The error rate is distressing. This is due to many things. 1. The calibration is way off. Even if they get it right, calibration mixes up completely the game. It is obligatory to calibrate much better tomorrow morning (can you do this frederic?) 2. The light conditions were very bad and have been improved a bit so that patches of white light are no longer seen as objects. 3. The visual situations about which the agents are playing games are way too complex. Even humans would not be able to play the game. I simplified enormously. We need to make similar clear situations AT ALL sites so that the agents can really learn the very basic concepts first. Also salience might have to be set lower to have multi-categories and consequently multi-words (although there is a fundamental bug in the multi-word thing it seems). Now the agents are making much too deep discrimination trees because of the confusing nature of the situation and the errors in pointing. If the top agent only has 20 in the setup because it is pure chance. The fact that success drops means that self-organisation is NOT taking place. 4. We might have to change the word creation rate to be less than 1.0. In the present circumstances I believe that every

agent will make for every node in the tree at very great depth his own word. I suggest that tomorrow we go through games with the agents step by step and fix the environment and the lights, etc. so that the game is at least feasible; at the moment it is not. The same exercise will have to be done in Brussels and Antwerp. There is a question how we can get rid of all the garbage that is being created right now. luc

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 13:07:48 +0200 From: Joris Van Looveren<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: paris site Luc Steels wrote: > 2. The light conditions were very bad and have been > improved a bit so that patches of white light are > no longer seen as objects. The problem is reflections on the whiteboard. In brussels the lights are covered so that there is no direct light falling onto the whiteboard. Consequently, it happens rarely if ever that parts of the background are seen as objects. Also, turn on the 'back light' option of the cameras. This improves the image quite a bit, especially at lower light intensities. I'll try to find out if it can be turned on and off from software, so that the setting can be saved along with the other configuration data. Joris.

```
–============_-1278188520==_d============
From: Luc Steels<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Major error in feedback
Based on the dismissal performance in Paris, we discovered a
major error in the feedback. I suggest that all sites at this
point PAUSE until we fix this and then we update versions on
different sites. This bug may explain why the lexicon has
disintegrated.
more news soon.
luc
```
*8 The first series (1999)*

**29 June 1999**

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:38:23 +0200 From: Joris Van Looveren<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Antwerp OK Antwerp has not been down, contrary to what the server page showed. The problem whas that the network was not accessible any more because the network interface of the alpha machine was down. This meant that the proxy was not available. According to Mario, the games have continued, so probably in a couple of hours when all interactions and agents have been uploaded, the database will be up to date again. At this moment, Brussels and Paris have been paused until further notice. Interactions continue to be uploaded until the network interface has caught up. Joris (in Brussels) & Mario (in Antwerp).

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:35:46 +0100 From: Frederic Kaplan<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Patches Bugs fixed 1. Feedback mechanisms and find-segmented-pointed by the hearer (this was not working at all...) corrected in: segment-tools.lsp and th-world.lsp 2. scaling. If a value is higher than the maximum, it gives max as opposed to 1.0!!! corrected in: geom.lsp 3. Masking. Eliminating zero channels should be done on the source not on value (= value after scaling, so it is often zero). corrected in: prototype.lsp (in the functions folder) After theses patches, sites can be running again. Fred and Luc.

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 23:25:45 +0200 (MET DST) Subject: There is hope for robokind After fixes to the Paris site by Frederic and me, I relaunched some agents. Things are now beginning to work as they should. We can see the agents quickly build up a successful lexicon. It is a pity that at the moment one can no longer give more than 20 games (although I can see the goal of getting to a global coherent lexicon that way). I try to circumvent by immediately sending them 3 times to Paris but I am not sure this works. Brussels and Antwerp should wait until all the fixes have been made before re-entering the network. Frederic and I will send a mail tomorrow morning. Once the system works, it is quite exciting to see your agents move forward quickly! Luc

#### **30 June 1999**

============\_-1278188520==\_d============ Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 11:16:41 +0200 (MET DST) From: Luc Steels<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: progress The mails to talking-heads go in a log file and I suggest that everybody not only sends technical issues but remarks. The Paris site is really taking off now. A lexicon is beginning to be in place, mostly focusing on positional information (left, right, up, down). Because the lexicon is getting established, it is now easier for new agents to acquire the existing lexicon and be successful. The agents have less bushy discrimination trees and fewer but effective words. This was demonstrated by frederic's agent (Kant) which quickly came to the top as speaker after only a few games! The word "green" apparently means red. So I am teaching my agents the word rouge instead of green. It is not yet clear to me whether you can influence the lexicon once it is already firmly established. Later this afternoon we might enrich the agents' experiences by changing the environment a bit. Luc

*8 The first series (1999)*

–============\_-1278188520==\_d============ Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 17:16:19 +0200 From: Joris Van Looveren<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Subject: Re: paris site Luc Steels wrote: > 4. We might have to change the word creation rate to be less than > 1.0. In the present circumstances I believe that every agent will > make for every node in the tree at very great depth his own word. Don't do this yet. It will cause the system to crash sooner or later, as I experienced in Antwerp and Brussels today. The reason is the method utterance-word-string is not defined on null-utterances. I'm trying to find out what result this method should return. I've been in Antwerp today to get it running again and to apply the patches. It had run well for quite some time when I left, but something caused it to crash again half an hour later. I'll try to fix it tomorrow with Mario, if he has the time to go there. Joris.

By mid July, the basic infrastructure, the teleportation mechanisms and the semiotic dynamics were running smoothly and so the experiment could operate without constant care.

## **8.4 Results of the experiment**

The first Talking Heads experiment ran for 4 months during the summer of 1999 and showed the validity of the mechanisms that were used for the agent architecture and of the interaction patterns and group dynamics of the agents. A shared lexicon and an underlying conceptual repertoire emerged, enabling successful communication by the agents about the scenes before them. In total, 400,000 grounded games were played. The population of agents rose to just under 2000, increasing steadily over the period of the experiment. Despite the many perturbations due to grounding, intermittent technical failures, a continuous influx of new agents entering the population, and unpredictable human interaction, the lexicon was maintained throughout this period.

The rate of communicative success for the first 200,000 games is shown in Figure 8.8. We see that the success rate is generally between 70 and 80 %. There are occasionally crashes (e.g. around 90,000) caused by problems at a particular site (such as bad light conditions).

#### *8.4 Results of the experiment*

Figure 8.8: The y-axis shows the average communicative success of agents at each of the three different sites for a total of 190.000 games shown on the y-axis.

A total of 8000 words and 500 concepts were created by the agents, with a core vocabulary consisting of 100 basic words expressing concepts like up, down, left, right, green, red, large, small, etc. Of these, 8 words represent a large majority of words used (about 80 %). 4 of these words refer to the position of objects: gorewa (top), down (bottom), wogglesplat (left), and sesubipu (right). 4 other words refer to colors: rouge (red), kazozo (green), wegirira (blue), and empty (light). The distribution of these words after 130,000 games is shown in Figure 8.9.

Figure 8.10 shows the semiotic dynamics related to an expression of the meaning for the concept 'left', i.e. a horizontal position between 0.0 and 0.25 (after scaling). The word "wogglesplat" becomes dominant although there is a very strong competition in the beginning. We see that users try to give other words to the same meaning, such as "gauche" or "links" (both words expressing left in French and German or Dutch respectively). We also see that other words such as "red" or "yellow" get associated with this meaning, because the hearer may guess the wrong meaning in learning the word for left.

Figure 8.11 shows another example of the semiotic dynamics in the experiment, this time looking at all the meanings for a particular word, namely *droite* (meaning 'to the right' in French). This word clearly has been introduced by a human user and the dominating meaning progressively becomes a region (between 0.75 and 1.0) on the horizontal position, as could be expected. On the way we see some confusion, Specifically there must be objects that appear both on the right and up (vertical position between 0.5 and 1.0).

Words Used

Figure 8.9: Distribution of word use. There are only a few words that are dominant. Many words are short-lived, either because the circumstances in which they fit are rare or because they do not get settled in the population. Moreover sometimes users create agents which they do not keep rescheduling for new games.

Figure 8.12 shows different meanings competing for the same word *bozopite*. Dominant ones are a large area (area scaled between 0.5 and 1.0) or extended width (width scaled between 0.5 and 1.0). These two concepts apparently could both be applied in many situations, but at some point new situations appeared that caused a symmetry breaking and area became dominant.

It was also possible that different meanings which were highly compatible were maintained in the population. An example is shown in the form-meaning diagram in Figure 8.13, which plots the average frequency of meanings for the word *down*. The meanings are all concepts on the vertical position channel vpos, but they carve out smaller and smaller regions.

## **8.5 Conclusions**

The Talking Heads experiment was without doubt a success from many angles. The mechanisms for concept formation, lexicon formation and alignment (as discussed in Part I of this book) all worked out the way it was expected, even in very difficult 'real world' conditions. The complex hardware could be maintained at the different physical sites and the general web infrastructure and agents teleportation mechanisms held up

*8.5 Conclusions*

Figure 8.10: Meaning-Form diagram: Different words for expressing the meaning 'left', i.e. horizontal position is less than 0.25 (scaled). New words come up all the time but there is a clear winner-take-all effect with "wogglesplat" winning.

despite a significant scale-up. An enthusiastic user group formed and they actively created agents and sent them out on the network, often also teaching their agents human language words which then propagated in the rest of the population. Users became very attached to their agents, upset when their agents could not get to the sites they had scheduled (because it took almost 1 minute for a complete language game and so other agents had to wait), and trying to figure out how and why they had learned certain words.

Numerous talks were given and various papers published in scientific fora. There were also various talks within the art context.2 The experiment received wide coverage in the media thanks to its public exposure as part of a major exhibition. The *Süddeutsche Zeitung* called it "Angels with Internet wings". All this led to invitations to show the experiment also in other venues, as discussed in the next chapter. Regrettably, the challenge just to keep the experiment in the air with the available human resources and the pressure for going on with new experiments prevented us from doing more adequate data gathering and analysis. Nevertheless some analyses appeared, particularly as carried out by Frederic Kaplan (Kaplan 2001).

2 Examples are a "gallery talk" as Salon 3 at the Elephant and Castle Centre in London on 2 December 1998, organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Molly Nesbit, and a presentation together with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas in Antwerp to launch the Laboratorium book on 3 October 2001.

The field of complex systems science was at that time still in its infancy and adequate tools for analysing language as a complex adaptive system were in the early stages of development.

The experiment ended with the following "tongue-in-cheek" post by Angus McIntyre on the Forum:

#### **1999-10-14 15:08:29 Angus McIntyre**

Bad news and good news

As the subject says, we have some bad news and some good news. First, the bad news. The current run of the Talking Heads experiment will come to an end on the 5th of November. After that date, access to the system will be closed off, meaning that you won't be able to create, launch or inspect agents any more. We realise that this will be a sad day for all of you who've participated so enthusiastically in the experiment. We will consider setting up self-help programs for anyone unable to cope with the pain of 'Talking Heads withdrawal'.

Figure 8.12: Form-Meaning diagram: Different meanings associated with the word *bozopite*.

Figure 8.13: Form-Meaning diagram: Different meanings associated with the word *down*. There are in particular two meanings. one is a region on the red-channel and another one a region on the vertical position channel.

#### *8 The first series (1999)*

Now the good news. The Talking Heads \*will\* be back. We currently expect to launch an improved version of the system early in 2000, probably late in January. We shall use the intervening months to try to make our software faster and more stable. When the system returns, we should also have some new sites, both public and private. And we're thinking about trying to find ways to make the system more interesting (i.e. by giving you greater control over your agents and the way that they learn and interact with other agents). If you'd like to comment on your experiences with the Talking Heads, or suggest ways that the system could be improved, this forum would be a good place to do that. I can't promise that we'll implement all your suggestions (we don't have very much time), but all your messages will certainly be read and considered. In the meantime, on behalf of all the Talking Heads team, I'd just like to say 'thank you' to all of you for taking part and making the experiment a success. Angus McIntyre Agent Public Relations Officer

Here is one commentary of a dedicated user:

#### **1999-10-27 18:52:04 Kampi**

RE: Bad news and good news

Are you crazy? Why do you do this at a time where winter with its long darkness is just ahead. Taking away from me the last beeings I can realy understand? So, of course I'm very sad about the bad news. And I insist on a self-help program otherwise I don't know what will happen to me. I propose to create some kind of holiday-camp for my agents which I can run on my computer; for example with some beach scenery, quiet apartment with TV and pool and only a little bit of teaching abilities, so that they don't become totaly stupid although they will be able to recover from all these mad and debile cans in Paris, Brussels and Tokio; please implement the possibility that it's me who swiches off the light at night; then, and only then, I can be sure they have a good time until the restart. But for serious: I hope very much that the Talking Heads will return as soon as possible. And I think you should inform those who are interested (me for example) by e-mail about the re-start. Some wishes for the improved project: a better performance, especially for the lexicon. And much, much more information about the scientific background. How do the agents create their words? Are these guys on the Web realy part of the 'official'; experiment? Why

did one of my agents suddenly create a three-part word (was there a bug in the software, how could it asume, that anyone would understand this, is it a syntactical genius and therefore its only natural that noone understands it or is it simply too stupid to understand the rules of the game? Is it the only agent who did this, why did it never try this again?... and so on). Anyway, more explanation for the 'future-heads'; about the experiment so that I understand why I should teach the agents. As far as I understood they were created to make sense (develop language) by their own. Yes, I know, 'stop making sense';. It's their job, not mine. Therefore at least a very big 'thank you; for having published the 'talking-heads'; on the net. A very sad user P.S.: Please send me the holidy camp including 2 single rooms and my agents caspar and Leyla as a zipped file by e-mail.

## **9 The second series (2000–2001)**

Shortly after the first Talking Heads exhibition in Antwerp, a new opportunity arose in 2000 to set up and run another large-scale experiment as part of a major exhibition called N01SE, curated by Adam Lowe and Simon Schaffer in Cambridge and London. This was potentially a great occasion because the exhibition was about issues of language origins, coding, replication, and noise. Moreover it would allow the expertise that was built up in the first experiment to be reused, tested again and hopefully yield more data for analysis. So two new installations were set up: one in Cambridge and one in London with additional installations at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels, the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and in Tokyo, and at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems laboratory of the University of Amsterdam (at the initiative of Ben Kröse). Later on a further opportunity presented itself to add an installation at the Palais de la Découverte, the main science museum of Paris. We also created a mobile version that was shown temporarily in several locations, as parts of other exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. All this further expanded the audience. The Paris exhibition alone was already seen by 300,000 visitors, augmented with hundreds of active participants and many on-lookers through the Internet.

Although all these installations were very instructive from a technological point of view, and certainly spread the word, we were reaching a point where it was no longer of interest from a scientific point of view. The problems of maintaining public sites were overwhelming our scarce resources and the N01SE experiment was invaded by a group of hackers intended on its destruction. This episode, discussed in Section 9.2, was more insightful from the viewpoint of sociology and anthropology than science or engineering.

## **9.1 The N01SE exhibition**

#### **9.1.1 The exhibition**

The N01SE exhibition was about information and transformation. Various locations in Cambridge (UK) participated: The Kettle's Yard university gallery, the Cambridge Whipple Museum of the History of Science, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Fritzwilliam Museum. The installations ran from 22 January until 26 March 2000. There was also a site in London at the Wellcome Trust Two10 Gallery in Euston Road, which ran from 28 January to 1 May 2000. Apart from the usual press coverage for art exhibitions, articles appeared in Science1 and the Lancet2 showing that the exhibition resonated also in the scientific press.

1 http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/sciencerev.html

2 http://www.garnettmckeen.net/lancet.html

#### *9 The second series (2000–2001)*

Figure 9.1: View through the street window inside the Kettle's Yard gallery in Cambridge. The cameras are located before the towers. The geometric figures are attached to the wall and explanations of the experiment are located on the right.

The N01SE exhibition was curated by Adam Lowe (see Figure 9.2) and Simon Schaffer. Adam Lowe is an artist and technologist. He is currently the director of Factum arte (Madrid) which is specialised in making life-like replicas of paintings, sculptures and archaeological objects, using laser-scanners and 3d printers. Recent realisations include the sculptures of Giambattista Piranesi (Lowe 2010), the paintings of Caravaggio and the tomb of Tutankhamun. Simon Schaffer is a science historian, professor at the University of Cambridge at the department of History and Philosophy of Science. He wrote extensively about the historical developments in scientific research (Schaffer & Shapin 2011) and animated television and radio programs, including *Light Fantastic* (BBC4).

The exhibition was announced in the following way by its curators:

A multi-site multimedia exhibition in Cambridge with "realtime" links to London, organised around three key themes in "digitality":

Universal Language Pattern Recognition Data Synaesthetics

N01SE is not limited to electronic media, but traces the digital imagination from such myths as Noah's Ark, through the early modern experiments of Charles

Figure 9.2: Adam Lowe (curator of N01SE) during installation of the Talking Heads experiment at the Wellcome Gallery in London. The backwall contained the figures. On the right wall, posters were displayed explaining the experiment.

Babbage's Difference Engine and Morse's Telegraph, up to today's charge coupled devices (CCDs), robotics and beyond …

Displays highlight digitality in history, technology, art and science, drawing upon a wide range of objects and images from artists and scientists around the globe – everything from 3000BC artefacts to the latest state-of-the-art pictures of the surface of atoms.

Not a virtual reality "hall of mirrors", but a cultural gallery of hard (and fuzzy) fact.

n01se celebrates the world as signal-and-noise – the constant simultaneous creation of content with discontents, as communication society filters "meaningful" messages from background "babble" . . . and back again. Ingenuity, serendipity and excess all play up the sensory wonderment of N01SE: The Digital and Its Discontents.

N01SE is news. It's the nuisance others make, a cacophony which prevents us being heard, or even thinking. Now the big noise is digital, offering us an escape from disorder by arranging, preserving and transmitting information. But is the cloudless noiseless world of digital technology the truth?

N01SE, hazy images and sudden sparks, random mutations and puzzling glitches, can all become the sources of innovation and beauty.

N01SE celebrates the essential excess from which information is drawn. It probes many different ways of seeing and being in the world. Chances are your own sense of order is already someone else's N01SE.

#### **9.1.2 Installation at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge**

"The Kettle's Yard Gallery is associated with Cambridge University. It acted as the main site of the N01SE exhibition and showed a variety of historical artefacts (including the brain of Babbage and the original DNA structure built by Watson and Crick) together with new artistic works. The catalogueue published by the Kettle's Yard Gallery 3 featured articles by Brian Smith, Umberto Eco, Bruno Latour, Bruce Sterling, Luc Steels, Peter Weibel and others. Below is my text as it appeared in the catalogue:

Meanings are not a priori Platonic entities independent of language; meanings are the result of embodied interactions with the world, obtained via the role words play in verbal interactions called "language games". The Talking Heads experiment explores one kind of language game: a guessing game played by two robotic agents about the scene directly in front of them. One agent acts as Speaker and attempts to draw the attention of the Hearer to some object by transmitting a verbal description of it; the Speaker succeeds if the Hearer correctly guesses which object is "meant".

To play the game, the Speaker segments the scene and performs pattern recognition to extract features – area, shape, colour, position – about the segments selected. The Speaker then conceptualises the focus element "topic" as distinct from those of other segments - be it the largest or the furthest to the left or the green one. Next the Speaker verbalises this conceptualisation using descriptive words selected from its lexicon. The Hearer works the other way around; it queries the words transmitted by the Speaker and applies the resultant meanings back to the scene to find what topic the Speaker intended.

To express conceptualisations, agents need a lexicon relating words to meanings. It must function bi-directionally (words-to-meanings and meanings-towords); it must also store synonyms (more than one word for the same meaning) and ambiguities (more than one meaning for the same word). The agents have not been given a lexicon; they must acquire their own common lexicon as a bi-product of the game.

New words accrue in two ways: either an agent creates its own new words from random combinations of syllables; or it stores transmitted words together with possible-meaning guesses inferred from the scene, then uses a hypothesistest strategy to render lexicons mutually compatible. Agents keep a running score for every word-meaning pair in their lexicon. When word-topic recognition succeeds the score for that pair goes up, and that of other alternates goes down. This dynamic forces the lexicon of each individual agent to progressively conform,

3 www.kettlesyard.co.uk/noise

and keeps it adapting to any language changes or new meanings that need to be expressed. During the course of the exhibition, a group of robotic agents autonomously constructs a shared language about real world scenes in front of them. Humans can interact with the installation through the Internet; they can teach their agents words and follow the general progress towards the construction of the language.

Intriguing questions: How to bridge the enormous gap between the noisy real world of images and behaviors, and the discrete digital world of symbols and language required for communication and thought? How do language and meaning originate? Why do languages keep changing so as to adapt to the needs of their users? How can a language be transmitted between generations without any central coordination nor telepathy?

The installation consists of two computer-controlled robotic camera heads that capture images from "scenes" in front of them consisting of colored geometric shapes pasted on a magnetic whiteboard. The configurations on the board can be changed at any time, making the robots' world unpredictable and open.

Two robotic structures will be active in this exhibition: one at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and another one at the Wellcome Institute in London. along with additional installations in Brussels, Paris, Tokyo and elsewhere. A website has also been created for the experiment (http://talking-heads.csl.sony.fr/)4 allowing anyone to create new agents. People can teach them words, so that elements of human natural languages can sneak into the emerging vocabulary. The agents are autonomous and do not necessarily stick to the words given to them but try to maximally adapt to the behavior of the group and invent their own words. Through the website it is also possible to monitor the progress of the experiment: the lexicon being created, the success rate, the coherence among the agents, the complexity of the language, etc. There is a Hall of Fame listing the best speakers and hearers. This motivates humans to take care of their agents thus ensuring that they move to the top in the Hall of Fame.

The creation of a shared language by a group of autonomous distributed agents is extraordinarily difficult because there are many sources of noise, in the form of disturbances that cause incoherence between the agents:

4 This website is no longer operational but some remnants can be accessed here: https://ai.vub.ac.be/talkingheads/

Any theory claiming to explain the origins of word-meaning must confront the handling of noise head on.

Noise plays yet another role, namely as a motor of language evolution. Indeed natural lexicons evolve - even if there are already perfectly good words in a language. Noise on the word form causes changes in the form which propagate in the remainder of the population. Misunderstandings may destabilise a word and cause its meaning to shift.

Another factor in language evolution is due to changes in the environment. Thus two alternative meanings for a word may be compatible for a while but are then disambiguated when a series of scenes arises in which the two meanings are no longer both applicable. For example, all objects may be both green and small and therefore there may be a word 'sesubipu' which may mean both, until a clear situation arises where a green object is no longer the smallest and a misunderstanding arises.

Semiotic evolution is continually present. Different meanings for a particular word will emerge over over a large number of language games. During specific periods, different words dominate. The word 'droite' (originally introduced by a French speaker) gains the dominant meaning 'to the right', then shifts to 'at the bottom', and then to 'very much to the right'. Particularly the words introduced by humans have a tendency to undergo this kind of strong evolution because human users do not know which meanings their agents employ.

How to bridge the enormous gap between the noisy real world of images and behaviors and the discrete, digital world of symbols and language required for communication and thought? How do language and meaning originate? How do languages keep changing yet remain adapted to the needs of their users? How can a language be transmitted between generations without any central coordination nor telepathy?

What is most remarkable about this experiment, is that the robotic agents do not come with pre-programmed ways of conceptualising reality but have to develop their own concepts.

Each agent has been given a mechanism to 'grow' new distinctions by expanding discrimination trees. Each tree discretises one sensory dimension. For example, there is a tree for the area of a segment (scale with respect to the image) which divides the range of possible values into two discrete regions, which would be named in English 'small' and 'large'. Other trees focus on position (left versus right or top versus bottom), shape (rectangular or oval), color, etc. Trees can go

as deep as necessary to carve out smaller and smaller subregions of a continuous space.

The nodes of the discrimination trees grow in a random fashion but the distinctions that are not successful in the game are pruned. This way the conceptual repertoire of an agent can continue to adapt to the needs of the agent.

How do agents manage to reach coherence in their lexicons without a central coordinator and despite all these sources of noise? The answer is self-organisation. Coherence is reached in the same way as an ant society manages to form a coherent path between a food source and the nest, namely by a positive feedback loop. In this case, there is a positive feedback loop between use and success: The more a word is successful, the more it is chosen by the agents, and the more success it will have. This causes the agents to settle in an attractor where they all prefer the same word for the same meaning and vice-versa. We see a damping of synonymy as in the case of natural languages. Noise has the beneficial impact of getting agents out of attractor states (so called local minima) which are not optimal from the viewpoint of the whole although they are a possible solution.

How do agents manage to share their conceptualisation of the world without their concepts being innately given (pre-programmed) nor centrally coordinated? The answer is structural coupling, another concept adopted from biology. Two systems have a structural coupling if one creates a context for the other and vice-versa, so that each system develops to be maximally co-ordinated without any prior design or global control. The conceptual system and the lexicon of each agent is structurally coupled in the sense that agents prune distinctions that are not successful in the language game, and conversely they keep the ones that are useful and successful. This makes the conceptual system progressively well adapted both to the scenes encountered by the agents and the lexicons used in the group. Sources of noise are again beneficial to foster structural coupling. First of all they help the group to push towards the use of categorisations that are robust against noise. Second, they help agents to explore alternatives and avoid them getting stuck in sub-optimal behavior.

A website has been created for the experiment5 . Through this site, anybody who wants can create new agents and follow their progress. Owners of agents can teach them words, so that words already used in human natural languages sneak into the emerging vocabulary. The agents are autonomous and do not necessarily stick to the words given to them but try to maximally adapt to the behavior of the group and invent their own words. Through the website it is also possible to monitor the progress of the experiment: the lexicon being created, the success rate, the coherence among the agents, the complexity of the language, etc. There is a Hall of Fame listing the best speakers and hearers. This motivates humans to take care of their agents thus ensuring that they move to the top in the Hall of Fame.

5 http://talking-heads.csl.sony.fr/

#### *9 The second series (2000–2001)*

To express a conceptualisation, agents need a lexicon relating words with meanings. The lexicon must be consultable in both directions (from words to meanings and from meanings to words). It must be able to store synonyms (more than one word for the same meaning) and ambiguities The agents have not been given a lexicon a priori. They have to acquire their own lexicon as a side effect of the game. New words get into a lexicon in two ways: When an agent has no word to express a particular distinction, the agent can create a new one by a random combination of syllables. When an agent hears a word that he does not know, he stores the new word with his own guess of what the meaning could be in the scene being perceived.

Agents then use a hypothesise-and-test strategy to make their lexicon compatible with the rest of the group. They keep a score for every word-meaning pair in their lexicon. When a word has success in the game, the score goes up, and its competitors go down. When the game fails, the score of the used word(s) goes down. This creates an inhibition-excitation dynamics making the lexicon of the individual agent progressively conform to the most successful lexicon of the group. It also ensures that an agent's lexicon keeps adapting if the language changes or if new meanings need to be expressed." (N01SE exhibition catalogue)

#### **9.1.3 Installation at the Wellcome Gallery in London**

The second installation during the N01SE exhibition was installed in the Wellcome Gallery in London (see Figure 9.3) from 22 January until 26 March 2000. This gallery is associated with the Wellcome trust and featured additional art works by Joseph Grigley, Evgen Bavcar, Manuel Franquelo, Garret and Jones, and Giles Revell. The local curator Denna Jones described the exhibition as follows:

"Digitality is transforming traditional ways of thinking about the impact of technology on culture. This exhibition looks at how complex structures can be transformed, translated and transmitted changing the nature of communication. A multimedia multi-site exhibition, N01SE demonstrates how language and our five senses can be changed or enhanced through 'digitality, and introduces visitors to pioneering developments in cross-disciplinary art and science."

The installation itself was similar to the one in Cambridge. There was a wall with geometric figures pasted on it, posters explaining the exhibition, the two pan-tilt cameras mounted on tripods, and the computers driving the software (see Figure 9.4). The London site posed particularly hard problems in the alignment of the cameras. It turned out that a subway was passing under the gallery and causing strong vibrations every few minutes, which caused the cameras to physically shift on the floor. Because the pointing behaviour was sensitive to alignment and prior calibration, this led to growing pointing errors and subsequent errors in feedback, causing a strong decline in the success rate and occasional chaos in the agents' vocabularies. This was partially offset by stable conditions in other sites but nevertheless made the task of reaching coherence virtually impossible.

Figure 9.3: Catalogue cover and poster of the N01SE exhibition at the Wellcome Gallery in London.

Figure 9.4: Installation at the Wellcome Gallery in London. Left: Talking Heads cameras oriented towards the wall on which geometric figures were pasted. Right: Projection of interaction during ongoing experiment. A game just failed and the speaker says "no".

#### *9 The second series (2000–2001)*

The exhibition catalogue, assembled by Denna Jones, contained the following text by Luc Steels:

"The Talking Heads Experiment is a collective effort of members of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris and VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Brussels, in particular Luc Steels, Frédéric Kaplan, Angus McIntyre, and Johan Van Looveren. This research has been sponsored by the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and a GOA grant from the Belgian government to the VUB AI Lab.

#### **Situated robots and teleports**

The installation consists of two robotic heads. These are steerable cameras controlled by a computer that hosts the architecture and knowledge state of each agent. The robots capture images from scenes in front of them. The scenes consist of coloured geometrical shapes pasted on a magnetic white board. The configuration on the board can be changed at any time, making the robots' world unpredictable and open. The robot infrastructure is connected to the Internet, so that an agent may dematerialise from a body and travel over the internet to another body in which it can re-materialise. Two robotic structures will be active as part of the N01SE exhibition: one at Kettles'Yard in Cambridge and another one at the Wellcome Trust Two10 Gallery in London.

There will be additional installations in Brussels, Paris, Tokyo and other places. The agent teleporting facility makes it possible to have thousands of robotic agents and to confront each agent with many different scenes.

#### **Constructing perceptually grounded concepts**

What is most remarkable about this experiment is that the robotic agents do not come with pre-programmed ways of conceptualising reality but have to develop their own concepts. Each agent has been given a mechanism to 'grow' new distinctions by expanding discrimination trees. Each tree discretises one sensory dimension. For example, there is a tree for the area of a segment which divides the range of possible values into two discrete regions, which would be named in English 'small' and 'large'. Other trees focus on position (left versus right or top versus bottom), shape (rectangular or oval), colour, etc.

Trees can go as deep as necessary to carve out smaller and smaller subregions of a continuous space. The nodes of the discrimination trees grow in a random

fashion but the distinctions that are no successful in the game are pruned. This way the conceptual repertoire of an agent can continue to adapt to the needs of the agent.

#### **Sources of noise**

The creation of a shared language by a group of autonomous distributed agents is extraordinarily difficult because there are many sources of noise, in the form of disturbances that cause incoherence between the agents:

Any theory claiming to explain the origins of word meaning must confront the handling of noise head on.

#### **Cultural evolution**

Noise plays yet another role, namely as a motor of language evolution. Indeed natural lexicons evolve - even if there are already perfectly good words in a language. Noise on the word form causes changes in the form which propagate in the remainder of the population. Misunderstandings may destabilise a word and cause its meaning to shift.

Another factor in language evolution relates to changes in the environment. Thus two alternative meanings for a word may be compatible for a while but are then disambiguated when a series of scenes arises in which the two meanings are no longer both applicable. For example, all objects may be both green and small and therefore there may be a word 'sesubipu' which may mean both, until a clear situation arises where a green object is no longer the smallest and a misunderstanding arises." (Catalogue N01SE exhibition)

*9 The second series (2000–2001)*

## **9.2 Iconoclasm**

The second series of Talking Heads experiments which were part of the N01SE exhibition, featured again a website with which human users could create their own agents, teach them words by going through images of past games, and send them off on the teleportation network. In the first series, a large group of users participated, posting enthusiastic commentaries on the forum, suggesting improvements to the interface, and discussing possible theories of language evolution. Unfortunately, during the second series, a group of students mostly from the University of Hull (UK) evolved from enthusiastic and interested participants into a mob of rude thugs that wanted to destroy the experiment at all cost, stimulated by local curator Denna Jones and insiders at the Wellcome Gallery, who apparently were strongly opposed that the N01SE exhibition took place at their location and somehow had a personal crutch against Adam Lowe, global curator of the N01SE initiative. This iconoclastic event was (in the year 2000) a forerunner of the damage that hackers have been inflicting on the web, destroying the spirit of collaboration and sharing with which the web was founded.

The British hackers realised that they could give dirty names to their agents and, because they could teach their own agents these words, they could also teach their agents dirty words for colours, shapes, or any other concept that agents were using. These words would unavoidably propagate in the population. As these hackers were extremely active, creating many agents, continuously launching them to different sites, and teaching their agents words, the global vocabulary progressively became unacceptable. The installations were in public spaces visited by school children, and so concern grew with the exhibition organisers at other locations (except the London site where those responsable for the exhibition actively encouraged this destructive behaviour). As a response, the experiment was temporarily halted and provisions put in to avoid that a small group would have excessive influence. It was still possible to provide a name to your agent and teach your agents words but some form of decency had to be respected. This change restored order but resulted in an overreaction of the part of the English hacker group who now used all possible means to attack the Talking Heads servers themselves, encouraged by Denna Jones and aided by others at the Wellcome Gallery.

This episode showed a phenomenon that a decade later has become very common. The web is far from an idealistic common ground through which people can exchange ideas and tools. It brings out the worst in some people, particularly if there is a mob effect in which different individuals with unstable ethical values push each other to do things they would otherwise not do.

It is instructive and rather fascinating, particularly from a sociological and anthropological point of view, to follow the dialog on the Talking Heads Website Forum between the main protagonists of the story. It went from enthusiastic interaction and experimentation to aggressive and hateful destruction. The misspellings, grammatical errors and foul language they produced have been left in the text. Only a small fraction of the dialog is reproduced here.

We pick up the dialog on the 25 February 2000. Until that date the forum was very active both with general discussions about the future of intelligence or the origins of language, and with specific questions, mostly why agents were so slow in playing games. Many users were too impatient and did not seem to realise that playing a language game could easily take a minute or two. However the major problem was the deviating alignment of the cameras, which had to guarantee that there was a common frame of reference between the agents, and hence the possibility of sharing attention. The cameras were mounted on tripods. When somebody accidentally moved the tripod, the frame of reference was no longer exact. As mentioned earlier, traffic (particularly subway traffic in London) caused vibrations of the cameras so that they kept shifting and getting out of balance.

A group of University of Hull students (with names like *Trash*, *yeah8a8y*, *schedski*) became very much involved. They communicated through the Forum using often slang and sexist language and making a surprising number of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. The group had been trying to impose their own language by very actively teaching their agents and sending them to the same site, namely Paris, which they had noticed had the most stable operating conditions. This worked (as indeed it was supposed to) at which point they decided to do the same with the London site although the camera alignment was too unreliable to allow the evolution of a stable language.

#### **2000-02-25 21:37:24 Yeah8a8y**

Paris "Hey there peeps... Thanks to the greatness of yeah8a8y, Paris has a great success ratio... Oh yeah with a little help from TRASH.... Ok a lot of help... Heres to Paris!!! The next server to be conquered is London!!!"

#### **2000-02-25 21:40:13 Yeah8a8y**

RE: Paris And you may notice the succes of a few of our words on the Lexicon.... God the greatness of a couple of wasters from Hull Uni, three days to conquer a server... Didn't think much to those Frenchies anyway!!!!!

#### **2000-02-25 21:52:23 Trash**

RE: Paris "Yeah London being the capital of the greatest country in the world and currently last in the server league well if we can get them frogs to say words the brits WILL CONQUER

#### **2000-02-25 21:55:49 Trash**

yellow MK 1 ESCORT Hey mate nice seeing you around paris !!!!

At this point, they realised that the London alignment was off and this is the first time that Phlox (as Denna Jones called herself) intervened. She immediately shows a negative attitude towards the experiment triggered by her personal conflict with Adam Lowe. Colleagues of hers (*fish* and *A Londoner*) respond with inside joke remarks that the Hull group does not understand. *Fish* had been trusted with admin passwords because he was responsable for maintaining the London site, but he greatly abused this trust as the experiment proceeded.

#### **2000-02-25 22:02:36 LondonCalling**

CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS London "Can London PLEASE calibrate their cameras???? PLEASE!!!!!

#### **2000-02-26 16:52:32 Yeah8a8y**

RE: CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS London very good.... Absolutely no chance of Domination if the cameras arn't calibrated... SORT IT!!

#### **2000-03-02 15:46:50** phlox

RE: CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS

i manage the two10 gallery in which the talking heads display is currently installed. would that it were so simple to sort it and keep the cameras correctly calibrated. all equipment was installed by the brussels group and whenever the cameras need calibrating - for whatever reason - it means one of the brussels boffins has to pop over to fix it. they've been over once since the exhibition opened and decided to move the cameras forward 2 feet. not really an exact science is it? the grand master - luc steels - is coming to the gallery tomorrow, so perhaps he will enlighten me as to why the cameras seem to need constant calibration, and i'll let you know. cheers.

#### **2000-03-02 20:04:52 fish**

RE: CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS London that's as maybe, phlox, but i'm guessing you secretly come into the exhibition and kick the cameras when you're in a bad mood, like say when someone has been horrid to you.

#### **2000-03-03 20:08:36 schedski**

RE: CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS London wassup fish?

#### **2000-03-03 23:06:43 fish**

RE: CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS London come on, admit it, you guys there spend all day stomping around your exhibits, breaking the displays, unplugging the monitors and generally mucking things up. i'm surprised london's still got two cameras even working and they haven't already been flogged down some boozer for a monkey and a couple of jellied eels

#### **2000-03-07 13:03:46 A Londoner**

RE: CALIBratioN OF CAMERAS London Well, if you people will confuse the poor things with your outrageous diction, they might know which way to point... One of them was practically in tears the other day as I watched it shaking its head in disbelief at the language it was meant to repeat. What ever happened to 'Adam's a cool bloke'?

Meanwhile the Hull group is pursuing and explaining their particular experiment that they carry out within the Talking Heads framework. The experiment itself is interesting and shows that they understand what is going on and are creative. Also the overall dynamics is working. The group realises that a language can form on its own or that it can be influenced by humans teaching agents their own language. At the same time, there is already one user (called Cheesy) who is pushing to introduce dirty words to the agents. He does not belong to the Hull group but is most probably somebody from the Wellcome Gallery already trying to put the N01SE exhibition in a bad light.

#### **2000-02-25 22:55:28 Norton**

Teaching While participating in this experiment seemed quite interesting - I'm simply not getting it. When I try to comprehend what is meant by certain words so that I can teach my agents - I cannot understand the distinctions made. Does anyone get it?

#### **2000-02-26 16:47:55 Yeah8a8y**

RE: teaching The best thing to do is to leave them for a number of games... Like the tips say 'bout 50... then start looking at the words they use, have to be successful tho'... then teach your other bots this word for that picture! It is a bit hit and miss tho' coz a lot of words are ambigious (?Sp) and mean different things... remeber it is actual properties and not usually shapes... But you can have success! Check out some of mine and Trash's word in the top 20 lexicon, Hullcitynutter,eightyfiftyone, msixtytwo, wotsit, mamorys

(Childish I know, but hey I'm a student) and you'll realise you can actually do it... Helps if your at Paris tho'!

#### **2000-02-26 20:41:20 Trash**

RE: teaching / TRIBES

Basically think about it like this... On the Earth there are many different languages spoken by people usually in a specific geographical location. Now myself and yeahbaby looked at this experiment (as we are very interested in AI and have done much work in this field) and decided to test the idea of "Tribes" where all those in that tribe speak the same lingo. We also figured that tribes rarely move out of their "Birth Location" so kept them at one site. As can be seen now ALL our Agents speak the same language and have even taught it to others outside the Tribe (such as the esteemed Yellow Mk 1 Escort and possibly even Anne's little Agent). These agents we considert to be forreigners!! But stilll they can communicate with our Agents... If you have noticed our words in the lexicon as explained by yeahbaby have very few deviations from what was intended unlike others such as "Gumble" which appears to mean Everything!!!!! This I do beleave Validates mine and my colleagues (Yeahbaby) opinion that language can only evolve in the pressence of small but tightknit communities.

As the next stage we wish to see what happens when 2 "Tribes" get together Hopefully they become multilingual !!. My theory is thatconfusion of words will be short lived and all will be ironed out after only a few games . Especially if the "tribes" are allowed to consolidate they meanings by once again returning to their own community with little outside influence.... I am sure you will all agree that personel experiments like these improve this and we would be interested to hear any opinion from others ...... are we doing the right thing or just playing gods etc??? Does this prove evolution as a basis or is there a need for gods etc....

Also anyone interested in settingg up a tribe PLEASE talk to us first as we have much experiance in these matters!

#### **2000-02-27 14:39:10 Oisin**

RE: teaching / TRIBES

Perhaps tribes could be created by sending agents to a specific server only eg only paris or only brussels and to see what words develop at the separate servers then switch after 2,4,6 months maybe any suggestions?

#### **2000-02-27 19:39:10 Trash**

RE: teaching / TRIBES You mean by not playing god ???? and letting them get on with it

at one site?? .... well yes but the server would have to be locked down by that tribe otherwise you would get outside inflences teaching them stupid like gumble which meanbs everything... it would probably take just 100-300 games each agent to develop a usable language (Aslong as the server has no agents from outside the tribe in there) By teaching them myslef and Yeahbaby got usable language going in less than 2 days!!!!!!! Just see the success of most of our words in the lexicon top 20!! God us 2 are good!!

#### **2000-02-27 19:39:55 smartypants**

RE: Collusion Tribes

I think the theories that are starting to surface is the most interesting part of the experiment for me. I started ignoring the 'teaching' mails as they seemed concerned with the technical side but thanks Trash for pointing out you had posted up your theory (p.s. when you talk about definitions of your words where are these, or are you just talking about studying the images?). The bit that I would like more explanation of ('cause Smartypants is an ironic name) is the bit about the two tribes coming together, especially as Paris is really the only viable option at the moment. I noticed that Virtuoso (the only one of my robots that managed to get into Paris in the last day) was unranked yesterday, but today has jumped to 140ish as both as speaker and a hearer - I guess this is because that one 'tribe' have been forced to cement that language.

The trouble is, without a good interpreter (us I suppose), won't it just cause confusion in our robots when they go and meet the other 'dumber' ones? i.e. they teach the others our words, but the others teach them the wrong words back as well. This means you would keep playing several iterations of the games. My thoughts on collusion were centered around this - we could reduce the iterations by all agreeing on common words to teach our robots, thus perpetrating more of the 'right' words whilst eliminating the 'wrong' words...

... any thoughts on my incoherent ramblings??

#### **2000-02-27 19:52:20 Trash**

RE: Collusion Tribes

At the minute me and Yeah are off the Paris server (we are regrouping our thoughts for further action!!!) But yes I did mean view the pictures when i said definition.

By 2 tribes I mean obviously two who have been taught on the same server. So say that i train my agents on there this week and you train your tribe next week on the same server with different words..... when both tribes are capable of good communication we then take half of each tribe and place them together in the 3rd week on the Paris server and see if they become multi lingual.

We then sned these linguists back to their own tribe and see what happens. Unfortunately many people have tried to jump on the band wagon of Paris success and send their Agents there with no idea what they are doing ... this has meant that we can not get our tribe to dominate as we would like..... The problems with organising tribe transfer is immense and it is a shame people don't exp[lain what they are doing on this fprum so that all could help out by say teaching their agents the words being used or even evacuating a site so that two tribes can collide ... It is a real shame that an experiment into AI and Language is hampered because people are unwilling to communicate with each other .... Well I guess that those of us who want a proper experiment should just ry their best in difficult circumstances... About the wrong words being taught !!! If your Tribe is more than 60% of the server then your tribe generallly succeeds in teaching the "foreigners" with little effect on themselves ...

**2000-02-27 20:46:29 smartypants** RE: Collusion Tribes

Thanks Trash. I was thinking in different terms... ... seeing as anyone doing anything is on the Paris server, I was imagining that as one 'big' tribe and that any outsiders (stuck on the other servers, or new) are the 'other' tribes so thanks for clearing that up for me.

This has more to do with Probability than anything else.

I'd be interested in working with you and Yeahbaby for a more meaningful experiment, particularly as loads of 'dumber' robots (by that I mean ones not enjoying the Paris success) will soon be unleashed on us.

Just to clarify, my plan up until now was to let my robots learn 40-50 words (as suggested in the tips), I started to teach them the most successful words from the lexicon yesterday (most of which were yours - grrrrrr, jealous!) and then I sent them to Paris. (This was before I started putting stuff up on the forum and saw your theory unfortunately).

The only one that got in was Virtuoso, and even then he didn't really get to play enough games as I was experimenting to see if the number of games you choose has any effect on getting into that server.

Anwyay, let me know if you're interested (I've only created 7 at the moment).

By the way, do I remember seeing somewhere that you're both girls?????

... 'cause I am...

If so it is interesting to see different ways people approach the experiment. If I was running the experiment I reckon I could do research from the forum, as well as the actual experiment.

#### **2000-02-28 14:25:01 Yeah8a8y**

#### RE: Collusion Tribes

At the moment it seems I can't get on the Paris server for love nor money... Never mind... Anyway Trash has good theories!!! Two particully good tribes at the minute, which also 'collided' ( Wait a minute, Frankie goes to Hollywood anyone? ) on the Paris server are run by me and Trash. There are some other out there (Cheesy) that are more content teaching obscene word to their bots. Anyway by both me and him filling up Paris (Max. of 16 agents from 20 at one point) a successful dialect has been taught between them. We now rank 5 words in top 10, and 9 overall in top 20. Again Trashs theories ring true. And the bit about words getting taught wrong is more a case of... well if a french person tuaght you the word for "Tower" and you where listening to someone who understood french, "Tower" would be used in the french wording, but you also retain your interpretation of "Tower" and use this one which you consider more successful in the speaking sense. This is what happened with our own "hullcitynutter" and "lafizana". My agents now understand both, but only seem to say "hullcitynutter" (Thier original word, not the learnt one)

This, of course, all goes out the window when you yourself teachs them... Maybe another bad aspect of this AI programming.

#### **2000-02-28 16:24:47 Yeah8a8y**

RE: Collusion Tribes OK no... I'm no girl!!! But there you go... I'm a bloke

#### **2000-02-28 17:04:23 Yeah8a8y**

RE: Collusion Tribes I'm posed with another problem... As you know Brussels and Paris have been inactive for a bit... do I keep with the project and just send the bots out to Paris... or use this as a change point and educate them in Brussel's... I'm going to stay with Paris... Teach other people the use of the words carefully set out by me and Trash... and generally gather more success! I now have 18 bots by the way most are ranked within the top 100.. 1 or 2 exeptions... anyway I have been successful by sending the all to Paris... for top gamage action It usaully takes all night but there you go... even the Earth took an entire week to sculpture.

To deal with the problem of agent congestion, software issues, and camera misalignment at the London and Cambridge sites, maintenance was carried out which led to a temporary unavailability of the experiment. Surprisingly, the reaction of the Hull group was entirely negative as they saw it as a way to prevent them from gaining or keeping control of the language used by the agents, even though Angus McIntyre clearly and patiently explained why maintenance was necessary. Also, Denna Jones (*Phlox*) took it personally as she did not realise that the calibration errors were due to vibrations caused by traffic of the London Underground near and under the Wellcome Gallery.

#### **2000-03-01 15:28:10 Angus McIntyre**

Performance, problems and fixes

As some of you have noticed, there've been some problems with this round of the Talking Heads experiment. For one thing, success rates have generally been very low, because the language has never properly stabilised. For another, a large backlog of agents has built up, and there have been considerable delays in getting certain agents to and from servers.

We are aware of these problems, and are actively working on fixing them. Part of the problem is that the Talking Heads has been a victim of its own success - lots of people participating enthusiastically makes for lots of agents, with new ones being added every day. Moreover, the Talking Heads is a 'real world' experiment, with real physical moving parts (the cameras) which means that each game takes a certain and non-trivial amount of time. These are just two reasons why things may sometimes move slowly in the world of the Talking Heads.

Problems have also been caused by the cameras losing calibration (that evil 'real world' strikes again), so that our agents sometimes seem to be looking at entirely different parts of the scene, something which is bound to cause problems. Last but not least, there turn out to have been some bugs in our software, particularly in the area of learning. The good news is that we've identified a number of things that may have an impact on success, and are currently busy fixing them.

We're about to start applying some fixes and making some changes to the way things work. We hope that there will be minimal disruption, but it's possible that the system may be a bit 'up-and-down' over the next few days. We may also start imposing more limits, for instance on the number of agents that each user can make, and on the number of agents that can land on a site at any one time.

We hope that once we've made the changes, things should start to work better. In the meantime, we'd just like to apologise for any frustration or inconvenience, and to thank you all for taking part in the experiment. Angus McIntyre Talking Heads Current Affairs Correspondent

#### **2000-03-01 16:29:54 Trash**

RE: Performance, problems and fixes Hi Angus, (Are you Threatening me ??? Bunghole!!!! ..... I am Cornholio) Ok I take the limited number of agents business is directed against my plans for world domination.... Well then its a fight!!! lol... Yeah take your point but just trying to create order out of anarchy.... strange really when i is an anarchist at heart... At last you is taking an interest in sorting out the problems/cheats used by people like me to pervert the way the system is run. Well in the best style of Hull University's Electronic Engineering Department you stop the cheats and I'll create new ones!!... only kidding mate ... but world domination is mine... One request though is if you could have many smaller servers .... I'm sure this would speed up the learning process..... May i suggest waterpistols at dawn for the fight??? Bungholio.... Laters mate.. P.S What do the scots know about language??!!!???

#### **2000-03-01 16:09:48 Marvin**

Reduced server list I notice that only Brussels and Paris are now on the server list. Has Cambridge been removed all together ??? I see there have been problems, but reducing the number of server's down to just two, increases the load. Could you not just add more server's, and spread the load around ? So far I have two agents, waiting since 23rd Feb to get into Brussels."

#### **2000-03-02 22:21:25 Angus McIntyre**

RE: Reduced server list

Cambridge and London have been temporarily taken offline because of problems with the alignment of their cameras. If the cameras drift too far out of alignment, the agents end up looking at totally different things, making it impossible for them to agree on a topic of conversation. Under such circumstances, a language can't form and any agent that ends up on such a site will come away deeply confused. While it's true that taking

#### *9 The second series (2000–2001)*

sites offline throws a greater load on the remaining sites, in this case it seemed like the lesser of two evils. We hope to restore service on these sites within the next few days, and to take steps to prevent a recurrence of the problem. We are looking into the possibility of adding some more sites to the network, but this depends not just on the availability of equipment but also on finding generous, public-spirited people who are prepared to find space to set up a Talking Heads installation and devote some of their time to keeping it running smoothly. We do have a few candidates in mind, however (some of whom don't even yet know that they're candidates, he said with a sinister laugh.) Angus McIntyre

Talking Heads Junior Camera Joggler

#### **2000-03-03 13:46:06 phlox**

RE: Reduced server list

so just how do you think the cameras "drift out of alignment"? and what steps do you plan to take to prevent recurrence? ask me to place a cctv camera watching your cameras so we can see what naughty person is touching them?? slap my wrists for not maintaining proper control in the gallery? hmmmm?? (ps - see my posting yesterday in response to yeah8a8y and london calling's messages of 25th and 26th)

#### **2000-03-07 00:56:52 Martin**

Nowhere to launch!!! All my agents are at home and I can launch them...nowhere!!!!!

#### **2000-03-07 13:30:22 Yeah8a8y**

RE: Nowhere to launch!!! Doh!!!... What do you think it says on the server page? "Due to essential maintance the interactive part of the site will be turned off" Hence no launching of agents...

#### **2000-03-07 15:08:20 phlox**

RE: Nowhere to launch!!! cant you play nice? do you have to be rude to everyone on the site?

#### **2000-03-07 16:32:44 Yeah8a8y**

RE: Nowhere to launch!!! Yeah... shitface... Nah anyway... I was pointing out the obvious!!! How is that message rude??? I dunno, givce a guy the ability to write and he thinks he's a philosopher!!! Chris Resident Hull Uni director of derogatory comments