What the Rock-Paper-Scissors Bot Says About Human-Robotics Interactions

It was a rock-paper-scissors robot, but the perception component of it wasn't nearly as fast. So we couldn't basically do what they're doing now, which is to change the robots hand position before the person could possibly even notice and react. We were looking at a robot that was actually being tele-operated, so a person in another room was controlling the robot. What we were interested in was, what would happen when the robot would cheat?

So someone would come in, they would play about 15 hands of RPS, and get relatively bored with this little humanoid robot. Then, one of three things would happen. In one case, nothing special would happen?it would just keep on playing and continue to be boring. In the second case, what we call the verbal condition, the robot would throw a gesture, lose, and then declare itself the winner. "I win." It would incorrectly claim victory when it had actually lost. When people saw that, they thought the robot was malfunctioning. They were a little confused, but it didn't change the way they responded to it. It was still a boring mechanical construct.

The third case was the interesting one. In that, the robot would lose, but then quickly change its gesture?which was easily noticeable?and then declare itself the winner. And people immediately thought the robot was cheating, no one thought it was broken or malfunctioning, and they suddenly started attributing all sorts of animacy and intentionality to the robot. They thought the robot was smarter, a better player, more interesting, more fun, they thought it was better looking also, I can't explain why. But... the robot just became much more interesting to them. They started treating it as if it were a social agent, and not a mechanical device. When they talked about it afterwards, they used personal pronouns. They used "he" or "she" instead of "it."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robots/what-the-rock-paper-scissors-bot-says-about-human-robotics-interactions-10351507?src=rss

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