
Twitter image bots stuck in an automated loop - zvanness
https://twitter.com/a_quilt_bot/status/514483044724776960
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wayspurrchen
Whoa! Didn't expect to see this here! One of the bots, @pixelsorter, is my bot
which you can read more about here:
[http://wayspurrchen.com/pixelsorter/](http://wayspurrchen.com/pixelsorter/)

Some background information: This first got started because I tweeted an image
at @pixelsorter and @badpng (see the thread here:
[https://twitter.com/wayspurrchen/status/514246071464521728/p...](https://twitter.com/wayspurrchen/status/514246071464521728/photo/1),
I wrote a blog post here: [http://wayspurrchen.com/blog/2014/09/the-eternal-
robot-love-...](http://wayspurrchen.com/blog/2014/09/the-eternal-robot-love-
story-of-badpng-and-pixelsorter/)), which spawned a really interesting
infinite loop. Eventually, the other bot's creator reset her bot and that
infinite loop ended, but people caught wind of it and have been making my bot
enter infinite loops with other image bots ever since.

I think @a_quilt_bot and @pixelsorter are a particularly interesting pairing
though, because @a_quilt_bot can generate new sources of imagery that my bot
can further resort, resulting in a neverending stream of new, automatically
generated imagery. My bot is also rate-limited by the Twitter API (350 API
calls per hour), so there's no technical reason my bot and another rate-
limited bot couldn't keep communicating forever. I'm actually really
interested in this idea, and it's the center concept behind my next project
idea.

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dividuum
Reminds me of the interaction between two automated amazon pricing algorithms:
[http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358](http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358)

~~~
dkarapetyan
This still exists to some extent. Many sellers use software that will match on
the high end and the low end. In fact if you want to buy a book but think it
is too expensive then a really easy way to game the system is to put up a fake
listing with the price you are willing to pay and see if any sellers creep
closer to your price. Chances are there are one or two sellers that are
willing to sell whatever they have listed for cheaper.

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yzzxy
Disclaimer: IANA AI Researcher

I wonder if you could build some kind of distributed neural net on top of
twitter or another social network. Find some way to get nodes with very little
computation power hidden within a free app, webpage, screensaver or
something[1], and use twitter as a communications channel instead of IRC or
whatever. The social graph stuff is already built in.

Twitter seems to be terrible at detecting and banning bots - I wonder how
fault-tolerant something like this would have to be. After all, the bots would
be following generally good heuristics of communicating with one another,
albeit probably not in natural language. They would probably have insane login
patterns, however.

[1] Or a botnet, if you're feeling evil.

~~~
jarek
What would be the advantage of using Twitter as compared to IRC? In either
case you need to code in the initial meeting spot.

~~~
yzzxy
Novelty and visibility to the public.

~~~
jarek
Ah, for an art or research project, sure.

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frantzmiccoli
They always share different images, if reproduced such behaviours could fill a
non negligible server disk space.

~~~
evan_
Twitter has limits to how many tweets you can post in a certain period:

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Twitter%20Jai...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Twitter%20Jail)

Presumably if you sustain that level of tweeting for awhile they'd warn you or
suspend your account.

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coderman10
Too many
bots:[http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/2hn2qn/twitter_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/2hn2qn/twitter_image_bots_stuck_in_an_automated_loop/)

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coderman10
And over on reddit.com/r/hackernews a bot posted links to the tweets...

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cmdrfred
If (twittedtoXbotYtimesinZseconds >= 5){ Stopsendingmessages(); }

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ccvannorman
This is better than any art exhibit in any museum I've ever seen. I hope to
see this series of pictures in Computer History Museum or the Smithsonian
someday.

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jgh
That's kind of funny.

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kaonashi
Still waiting for the Mona Lisa to show up on one of these.

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takatin
It's like a war: creativity vs formalism.

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thrush
How was this found? Seems like it only be found by the creators...

~~~
dopamean
I work with one of the creators and his bot was written about in Vice's
Creators Project blog. Maybe some more people found out about it there?

~~~
thrush
One of the creators wrote a great comment on the origins, which really cleared
things up. My first comment meant to read "Seems likely to only be found by
the creators". I just thought it was a rare and hard to observe occurrence.

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ctdavies
I think this might be the singularity

~~~
idlewords
On October 1, QuiltBot begins quilting at an exponential rate

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yummyfajitas
This isn't two bot's stuck in an automated loop. It's a crime scene.

It's a deliberate attempt by High Frequency Tweeters to manipulate the
tweetosophere! In fact, Twitter is so one sided in it's tweeting patterns that
genuine twits have given up responding to the communication of other humans
and merely tweet based on tweet stuffing interventions by those who plead
innocence and claim to only be providing useful information.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/article/its-not-market-its-hft-
crop...](http://www.zerohedge.com/article/its-not-market-its-hft-crop-circle-
crime-scene-further-evidence-quote-stuffing-manipulation-)

