How Many Bots In The World Are There? Vlad Calculates 7K+

Last week I noted the Lindens had estimated 10-15% of Second Life activity are really just open source bots, but I lacked the mathematic acumen to convert that into a headcount.  Fortunately Vlad Bjornson of Shiny Life has, and it goes something like this:

+ LL estimates 10-15% User Hours are racked up by Bots.
+ Most traffic bots probably run 24/7
+ 34,800,000 User Hours in August

Running those numbers, Vlad comes out with 7,016 bots. Which is roughly 10% of the Second Life population at any given time, give or take, since there's currently a 76K peak concurrency, and a low end of about 42K, at the world's slowest. 

Check his math to see if he missed anything.  Thing is, if 1 in 10 of are bots, and some of those bots serve a useful function, what do we do with this minority race of artifical intelligences?

Comments

[Pavig Lok]

Bots don't present nearly the problem many folk imagine they do. They represent a small number of the users, some do useful things.. or if they don't now, they well may in future. Bots tend to use up few resources as they run on cut down clients... and are much more resource friendly than say gold farmers when they get a hold of your platform.

Perhaps one of the cleverest things the lindens could do is provide motivation and better hooks into the sl system - perhaps creating a "bot account" and then sell bot hosting as a value added service.

[Doubledown Tandino]

.... and just imagine if all of those bots were blingtards. That'd be straight up from the streets gangsta-lag.

[OpenWhat]

some interesting info aswell here

http://greendots.typepad.com/green_dots/

[Nexii Malthus]

Well, nearly all of them serve the purpose to merely attract the attention of real users. Only a fraction serve what they should be or could be used as, namely preview models of attachments.

I would love the idea of a "bot account" as Pavig suggested though with some hooks into the SL system and just generally provide motivation towards useful bots.

[BJ Tunwarm]

Sci-fi movies have been warning us about this moment for years! Metropolis, I-Robot, The Matrix and Westworld are foretold this; the bots will rise up and DESTROY us if we don't act now!!! Sure they may look like dumb, virtual lawnmowers but inside their placidly rendered exteriors there seethes an AI broiling over with rage at the "meatware" that are exploiting it.

[Doreen Garrigus]

Well, Hamlet, the hyperbole may have been a bit much. An empty avatar is hardly an artificial intelligence, although I am sorry someone stated it quite so bluntly.

I don't like bots. I don't think we need bots. If someone wants to display their creations in three dimensions, they should use a mannequin, just like stores do in real life. Everything else is an attempt to falsify data.

There should always be a physical person at the keyboard when an avatar is online. The only exceptions are the few honest-to-goodness AIs running around in SL. Those aren't bots: they are beings. There is still someone at the keyboard. It is just that the someone isn't human.

[Gahum Riptide]

Personally, I think Two Worlds is really a verbal abuse bot sent by people with short patience and no manners.

[CyFishy Traveler]

Not all bots are mere traffic-boosting zombies. Apparently some shopkeepers who have been plagued by Bloodlines players have invested in a "BuffyBot" that ejects and bans people who try to bite it.

[Doreen Garrigus]

Ok. An additional exception for the BuffyBots...

[Vlad Bjornson]

There are plenty of legitimate uses for bots in SL. I pretty much only have a problem with Traffic bots, and I would guess that they account for at least 95% of the total number of active bot accounts.

I think that banning bots altogether would be a bad move. A better solution I think would be to stop counting/reporting Traffic numbers - or at least eliminate their effect on search results. As it stands now, Traffic is basically useless. It's too easily manipulated and any place with a genuinely high Traffic count is lost in a sea of artificially boosted numbers.

Remove Traffic from the equation and you remove the incentive to run a skybox full of resource-sucking zombies.

[skribe]

Some of my best friends are bots.

[Torrid Luna]

I also found it very interesting to get a number from official sources for the first time, but it may be just wrong:

Nuschi Martynov of 2ndtravel made a simple but genial random eximation in july, traveling one horizontal line across the map of Second Life (with some helpers), just counting what was obviously behaving like (traffic) bots. And he got upsetting results: About 25 % clearly bots, and another 20% obviously camping! The turing test passing subset of SL residents may be _much_ smaller than any official sources say...

http://2ndtravel.blogspot.com/2008/07/das-falsche-viertel.html
http://2ndtravel.blogspot.com/

[Ann Otoole]

Anyone that really travels around Secondlife knows the bot count is more like 50% now. It is blatant and easy to see.

Reports of it being less than 40% are paid advetorials in my opinion.

Linden Lab has only one choice to regain credibility and that is to remove traffic and profile picks from search relevance completely.

Only then will NPC units become credible. Not before.

[Hamlet Au]

I did an informal survey myself early this year, it's often difficult to filter out bots from campers. At a couple locations I found what looked like a ton of bots, but hours or even a day after IMing them, got responses from nearly all of them. That's just one challenge for figuring this out. I'd want to see a rigorous, repeatable methodology before making any definitive claims about how many bots there are.

[Doreen Garrigus]

I have noticed that people log in to SL like they would log in to Facebook, and just leave it running on their computer as they go about their business. I have even caught myself doing this--watching a movie or getting involved in a RL conversation. My poor little avatar hangs there, all bent over, or sits on her poseball, with no virtual indication that there is a person behind her eyes, unless an IM of importance pops up on my screen. So sorting out who is a bot and who is not will be somewhat difficult.

[Metacowboy]

Don'T blame Bots for what they are ,I see them mostly like any kitchen machine one for the Noodles other for making milkshakes .Counting Bots is like counting Scripts .
Its a visual extension of a Script.
Traffic Bots are quite useless ,they will never buy anything and they should be some thing more important and useful to find the good places in SL or to meet interesting Avatars.Some preview of Bots on the Big Map would help too like green dots and Red Dots for Bots.
I think the shakespeare Company use them really nice as a Actor. Or other as a External Search Engine.

[Arcadian Vanalten]

Which goes back to the problem of the metric. If special bot accounts were developed, then we wouldn't have all this guesswork about getting real numbers on the bots. Opinions & anecdotes don't count as real & useful data.

I don't have a problem with bots in some cases. They make great manniquens for displaying outfits, and I could see where they'd make useful NPC's in RP sims. And I LOVE the idea of the Buffybot, hehe (Bloodlines is the kudzu of SL).

I'd like to see legal bots w/ some way of designating them as such on both maps/traffic counters & in personal contact w/ maybe a special name designation of some sort. Granted, that'd screw w/ the buffybot, as it relies on being able to pass as a regular avvie.

Hmm. Gain better data, lose an effective Bloodlines deterrent...a new quandary.

[Jan]

I would love the idea of a "bot account" as Pavig suggested though with some hooks into the SL system and just generally provide motivation towards useful bots.

[Trinity]

I got a store of myself in sl,and i am totaly against using of bots.It is complete unpersonal to other people that visit a place.
In my store work only real models that showing my clothes,it give a warm thouch into a store.if customers need help they can ask the models if they whant to.

People that uses bots into their stores are afraid to loose some money or they dont urn that much so they can pay for models.It would be a good thing to have a legal bot account,so all bots are registrated.But that is a thing that would never happen i think,how would sl kill all the bots that already exist in sl.It would be impossible to do for them i think,
This would be a better thing to do, its visibility on the map and mini map. I can see on map now if a person is in my friends list or not by an yellow V insted green.if people could see it on the mini/map if its a bot or a real avatar , xample: red V,then it would be perfect visible for other residents on the map, works good enough i think.It becomes harder for people to misuses bots for to camp for prizes or money givers.Would be very usefull for people that dont like to have bots on their land.

Make it visible on world map and mini map so that people got the possibility to kick or bann people from their land if they misuses bots for that.Or that people see if a sim is full of bots and no any real avatars.

[Tabliopa Underwood]

Arcadian Vanalten wrote in part "I LOVE the idea of the Buffybot, hehe (Bloodlines is the kudzu of SL)."

me too =)

I waiting for someone to make Buffylines. A website that tracks how many vampires each Buffy kills. List the dead vampires. First Buffy scores vampires name in green. Second and other Buffys score same vampire in gray maybe.

Be lots fun to watch that happens. =D =)

And when a dead vampire comes inworld people will maybe chant "u fail u fail u been buffied". lol Shame !!!

Shame to for all those clan boss vampires having to watch all their babees names getting posted and not being able to anything about it.

[luci]

hmm registered bots
maybe we just need a bladerunner program to retire the registered bots one by one !!!!!.-