The Turing Game

I frequent the Yahoo chat rooms. The naughty, seedy, dirty Yahoo chatrooms. And there's an interesting, and eminently gameable phenomonen there.

Ostensibly, people gather in the chatroom to chat with other like minded individuals on on one subject or another. The Yahoo chatrooms are only generally categorized, and uniquely identified with only a number, so the specific subject can be a crapshoot. They used to allow user created rooms, which would have more clearly labeled subjects, but they spiked those, when tv news programs discovered that some of the titled rooms promised less than seemly chat. So there's gameable element number one, though that's not what I would consider a core gaming element.

No, the core gaming element lies with spambots. The clever spambot posts phrases to make you think it's a live person, so that you'll check out its profile page, and hopefully click on its links to whatever pay personal site or webcam site or whatever site it's affiliating with to get a clickback. The dumb spambot merely posts the link directly in the chatroom.

Now, let's what data is revealed to both spambots and humans. First, you can see a list of everybody in the room, and who has a webcam running. Second, you can see nicks entering and leaving the room. Third, you can see messages posted by various nicks.

And let's take a look at client connections. Some clients will allow you to connect multiple IDs to the service simultaneously. This will let you connect two of your bots to a chtroom so they can converse with each other in an attempt to lure users to their pages. Other clients will display different sizes and colors of fonts, thereby allowing you to drop your lure and take up a significant chunk of screen space.

Here's the most popular failings of the bots as they run now:
Obvious nicks. Some bots are obviously nicked as bots, and while this makes management and accounting easy, it also makes bot spotting easy.
Name Dropping. As I noted above, anybody connecting to the chatroom gets a list of the participants in the chatroom. Many bots drop conversational lines that could be plausible enough, except that when they drop a name in the conversation, it's not a name of anybody in the room.
Non sequiturs. The aforementioned conversational lines that get dropped are completely preprogrammed, and tend to run in in trends. What I don't understand is why they don't have ELIZA routines to grab conversation from the room, or even from a different room, to echo into the room.

Each chatroom has a max capacity of 50 users. So you have to compete for slots with your opponents, other bot herders, without overwhelming the optimum user:bot ratio in the room.

Clicking on affiliate links in profile pages is only the most basic payload. There's also fishing, where you try to lure users with the promise of looking at photos, but presenting them with a spoofed yahoo login page to grab their id and password, and also attempting deliver a trojan via private message.
The basic play of the game will be the player, competing against other players, all as botherders, trying to collect and build the most turing passable bots. You're all in a chatroom, and you lose points for every bot that suckers you, while you earn points for everytime one of your bots suckers your opponents. If you can hook them with a payload, you can copy their botwarez, and corrupt their programming.

bkd