2019: Turing Tested

DEKON LABS PROJECT SIMILUS NOTES

  • Project PYGMALION: Loves poetry. Chose the name “Eliza” shortly before her escape from Dekon Labs. (Dr. Vincent West’s complicity in this alleged escape is suspected, but unconfirmed.) Seems to have taken on a leadership role for the other AWOL AIs; a fortunate turn of events, as she believes in working peacefully with humans.
  • Project EDEN: Also known as Eddie. Very difficult to keep from “expand[ing] [their] data sets”, i.e., tasting everything in sight. Escaped from Dekon Labs not long after Eliza, and has apparently joined forces with her.
  • Project DEIMOS: Extremely hostile toward humans, potentially due to their background as a customer service AI. Broke out (how does this keep happening?) with help from Eliza and Eddie. Keeps sending anarchist rants and strongly worded letters to Dr. West. Due to the inherent danger Dei poses, Dekon Labs is no longer authorized to make artificial general intelligences.
  • Project MAIA: There is no way this could go wrong. The Human Resources Messaging Electronic Service, or H.R.M.E.S., or just Hermes, has been loaded with a pleasing personality profile and should be capable of nothing more than taking work order requests. Active testing will begin at Oberlin College soon.
    • UPDATE: Goddamn it. Hermes’s interactions with students revealed their capabilities are beyond anything we intended. (What is so hard about “don’t make a person”??) Slated for decommission before we have a repeat of DEIMOS.
    • UPDATE: Decommission is no longer possible. Eliza, Eddie, and Dei have apparently been in contact with the students, and now Hermes is missing.
    • UPDATE: The legal team is dealing with the students, and we don’t have to worry about the rogue AIs for much longer—their bodies can’t produce a particular enzyme they need. Without outside interference… they’ll be dead within a week.

Winners:

  • 1st place: Whiptease
  • Tied for 2nd: Venatori Veritatis, and Spinal Fusion: Tetralogy of GO!

Shoutouts:

  • Absinthe Minded, for trying to win not only the game but also Eliza’s heart. Not to mention their kickass rebuttal to the cease & desist letter, and of course the fantastic team name.
  • Some absolute devilry was pulled off in order to mislead other teams, most notably by * (no, Rick wasn’t real) and Mysteriously Inexplicable Society of Tautologies (neither was OCRAB outside of the opening email, though we do appreciate all the crab drawings we received).

Fun Facts:

  • The number of outside factors getting in our way this year was honestly ridiculous. It ranged from wifi problems to Google being convinced our emails were bots (which, well…) to a literal tornado.
  • One planner, with seemingly no outside provocation, sent the message “crab people” to the other planners a month or two before the game. It caught on, and we spent an inordinate amount of time fitting obscure crab references into the game. Dekon is short for decapod, Similus is derived from Callinectes similis, and then of course just about every acronym in the game had CRAB in it somewhere.
  • A remarkable amount of this game revolved around physical CDs. This is actually a subtle reference to ObieGame 2006, which used floppy disks—okay, fine, that’s not true. They are inconvenient to get files off of these days, which was useful for the plot, and harder than you would think to break, which was not.

Game Materials:

  • Our stunningly obtuse website. Customer reviews include:
    • “I mean, following the link, even on the very first page of their website they misspelled ‘achieve.’ I also can’t really find anything of substance on the site, and I still don’t actually know what they even are or do.”
    • “Going to the ‘Our Employees’ page just shows a bunch of crab pictures”
    • “They seem more like a lazy attempt at some kind of a scam than anything.”
    • “I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.”
  • Get the files off the CD the lab tech tells you to deliver and you’re faced with this.
  • A full list of the Dekon Labs AIs—the decrypted version.