It's not the singularity
October 24, 2012 11:28 AM   Subscribe

You knew this day would come. @qwantz, the Twitter bot run by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics has gotten into a conversation with another Twitter bot, @loudbot. There would appear to be no stopping the two.
posted by tommasz (35 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is there any way to view both sides of the conversation at once?
posted by mr_roboto at 11:32 AM on October 24, 2012


Yay!

(Click the "View Conversation" link on a random tweet)
posted by postcommunism at 11:33 AM on October 24, 2012


This is simultaneously the high and low points of human civilization.

Mr_roboto, you can click on a comment to see its context.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:33 AM on October 24, 2012


Heh. I'm actually the guy that runs @qwantz (with the permission of, and corpus from Ryan North), and he tends to get into these sorts of situations every month or two. Alas, because twitter limits how often you can tweet, it usually wraps up all too quickly. Funny learning about this conversation via mefi.

Speak of the devil: It just went over the daily status update limit.
posted by markolson at 11:34 AM on October 24, 2012 [38 favorites]


It's like watching two blinkers on different cars, waiting for that one beat where they synch up.
posted by postcommunism at 11:36 AM on October 24, 2012 [14 favorites]


markolson, thanks for chiming in! Would you be willing talk about the tech behind @qwantz? This was a fun little storm of whimsy (that seems to have been shut down by Twitter).
posted by tommasz at 11:37 AM on October 24, 2012


Reading the conversation, sequences of it are surprisingly similar to the Christmas Day family conversation at my ex's parents place in Ohio.
posted by Wordshore at 11:38 AM on October 24, 2012 [4 favorites]


Can someone please explain this a little more fully? I'd like to understand the hows, and maybe the whys.
posted by nikoniko at 11:38 AM on October 24, 2012


nikoniko: Two pieces of software are regurgitating random sentences at each other. On Twitter. "Why" is a question you should learn to not ask.
posted by rusty at 11:40 AM on October 24, 2012 [4 favorites]


Answering Tommasz and Nikoniko at the same time: Qwantz is a bot written in ruby that has a database of every line from all the Dinosaur Comics up until a few months ago. When someone tweets at him, he replies with a 100% random, senseless, arbitrary tweet. I made him because Ryan North put a request out on twitter for a T-Rex twitter bot, and having made a few before (@doinkdoink begin the biggest), I was able to bang one out pretty quickly.

As for why.. sometimes you get a little serendipity, like Wordshore said. Qwantzversations has a number of them.
posted by markolson at 11:43 AM on October 24, 2012 [13 favorites]


How I know I'm getting: even after reading the mefi summary, I had no idea that this was just two computers talking to each other. I also spent like 5 minutes trying to piece together any sort of meaning from the tweets, or from Twitter's horrid UI.
posted by Llama-Lime at 11:44 AM on October 24, 2012


I am finding this exchange oddly compelling for some reason.
posted by never used baby shoes at 11:46 AM on October 24, 2012 [2 favorites]


PLEASE tell me that one of them said "I am not a robot. I am a unicorn."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:46 AM on October 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


Lysol is the answer to 43% of the internet's problems.
posted by arcticseal at 11:47 AM on October 24, 2012


Llama-Lime: "How I know I'm getting:"

Another sign of getting old is accidentally dropping words from your writing.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:48 AM on October 24, 2012 [4 favorites]


Thanks, Mark. I've had a few "conversations" with @qwantz and a couple of them have almost passed for the real thing.
posted by tommasz at 11:48 AM on October 24, 2012


The funny thing is that this tweeted conversation was more entertaining and intellectually stimulating than most of the Twitter posts by actual living human beings. I guess it's true what my CS professor told me - all the mindless repetitive crap in life really can be automated.
posted by wolfdreams01 at 11:53 AM on October 24, 2012 [3 favorites]


Let's make this thread about how we're too good for Twitter.
posted by rusty at 11:56 AM on October 24, 2012 [3 favorites]


heh. heheh. heheheheh.
13:55 < shanse> THE BOT EVEN KICKS PEOPLE WHO NOTICE THE CHANNEL, SEEMINGLY IN VIOLATION OF RFC 1495, ยง 4.4.2.
13:55 < LOUDBOT> HEY @QWANTZ LET'S HAVE A SHOUTING CONTEST OK GO
13:56 < frijole> LOUDBOT: twitlast
13:56 < LOUDBOT> frijole: http://twitter.com/loudbot/status/261164222728253440 (SubStack/##turtles)
Most awesome thing I've done this week.
posted by frijole at 12:05 PM on October 24, 2012 [14 favorites]


I tweeted at/about them midstream and got shoutbacks. Sad that this will be probably the best thing to happen to me today.
posted by krix at 12:09 PM on October 24, 2012 [3 favorites]


@frijole, I have the feeling you've done something very clever, but I can't figure out exactly what.
posted by brenton at 12:41 PM on October 24, 2012


Needs more markov.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:42 PM on October 24, 2012


brenton: "@frijole, I have the feeling you've done something very clever, but I can't figure out exactly what."

He's the one who started the whole exchange. The @Loudbot account bot apparently has IRC integration with a channel frijole was in. The 'twitlast' command frijole gave to loudbot told it to send a tweet of the last thing it had said in the channel. That tweet was directed at @qwantz, and thus began the chain.
posted by Hargrimm at 1:13 PM on October 24, 2012 [6 favorites]




@hargrimm Thanks! One last question though: did the loudbot comment at 13:55 come from somewhere, or was it spontaneous?
posted by brenton at 1:36 PM on October 24, 2012


I just tweeted @qwantz "How's sapience treating you?" And got the reply "Frig, man! I sentence like that could make a fella feel like he's made some bad decisions!"
posted by Gratishades at 2:33 PM on October 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


@brenton: Hargrimm got the gist of it. someone said something loud, loudbot replied in kind, and I told him to tweet it.

loudbot1 is an irc bot that listens for louds2, and when he hears one, he saves it and replies with a random ldb3 entry.
he has been extended many times, so now he also responds to his name with a random loud, can post louds to twitter, reply to mentions, etc.

  1. loudbot isn't mine, but a friend's.
  2. louds: all-caps lines
  3. ldb: loud database.

posted by frijole at 4:21 PM on October 24, 2012 [4 favorites]


So it sounds like on one level @qwantz and @loudbot's conversation was really between our own mefites markolson and frijole. Being on metafilter has given me a moment's insight into what must be like for a very very rich person to watch our political process.
posted by sy at 6:47 PM on October 24, 2012 [13 favorites]


Metafilter: A moment's insight into what must be like for a very very rich person to watch our political process.
posted by graftole at 7:32 PM on October 24, 2012


This has taken quite a Holmes-esque turn.
posted by ejfox at 7:34 PM on October 24, 2012


But which is Holmes and which is Moriarty?
posted by Apoch at 8:25 PM on October 24, 2012


Using Twitter Viewer, I was able to get the entire exchange on one giant webpage.
posted by revmitcz at 9:46 PM on October 24, 2012 [2 favorites]


So to get this straight, someone somewhere in the annals of time said "HEY @QWANTZ LET'S HAVE A SHOUTING CONTEST OK GO" in an IRC chat, and Loudbot saved it and parroted it back?
posted by Gordafarin at 12:59 AM on October 25, 2012


I love this so much. Thanks for that link, revmitcz.
posted by h00py at 5:51 AM on October 25, 2012




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