A Robot, Slave or Companion Species

A Robot, Slave or Companion Species?
The naming practices and culture of robotics competitions Andra Keay Masters Candidate, Digital Cultures University of Sydney 22 June 2011
Abstract
The naming of robots bears witness to their emergence as a new ontological category, birthed in robotics competitions, forming a laboring companion species. This thesis is the result of a sociological survey into the naming practices of competition robots, informed by my autoethnographic research into the culture of robot competitions. Many interesting names and connections appeared. Most robots in competitions were named and gendered as well. Names reflected human/machine hybridity, as well as anthropomorphism. The names demonstrate interesting levels of subjectification in even the least anthropomorphic or lifelike of robots. Overall, this data supports the robot as a new ontological category hypothesis (Kahn Jr. et al), and further poses the questions, how does this come about and what does that mean? Donna Haraway has made interspecies translation her specialty and so I knit this investigation of a new being becoming into her cats cradle with both factual and fictional robots. My conclusion is that robot naming in competitions is a performance of companion species co-shaping in the contact zone between organic/technic, master/slave and subject/object, supporting the robots as new ontological category hypothesis. Robot naming demonstrates human-robot social relationships and both slave, pet and hybrid naming characteristics. My thesis suggests that competitions function as a birth rite of passage, and that naming dubs or introduces the new being to the world and brings the world into the robot.
KEYWORDS: Human-Robot Interaction, Social Theory, Cultural Theory, Onomastics.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Becom ing a New Being Introduction New Ontological Category Hypothesis The Birth of a Robot in Com petition Rites of Passage Robot Competitions Rituals of Birth The Original Question; Gender or Nam e? Some Theories of Naming Case Study: Grey Walters Tortoises Case Study: Poppy Da Vinci Robot Nam e Survey Purpose Method Results Discussion Slave or Com panion Species? Laboring in the Uncanny Valley Contact Zones and Other Languages From Kin to Kind, a small conclusion References Appendixes Included Tables Additional Tables 2 2 4 10 10 15 21 25 25 37 40 43 43 45 52 62 64 64 70 74 77 88 88 92
Becoming a New Being

Introduction
The naming of robots bears witness to their emergence as a new ontological category, birthed in robotics competitions, forming a laboring companion species. As a cultural theorist interested in human-robot interfaces, I take threads from many disciplines and find interest in the ordinary. As Ien Ang suggests (2011): Culture is integral to and constitutive of social life, not something outside of or a mere addition to it. This thesis is the result of a sociological survey into the naming practices of competition robots, informed by my auto-ethnographic research into the culture of robot competitions at schools and universities. My initial motivation for studying the naming of robots was to find reasons for the gendering of engineering (Cockburn 1999a, 1999b), which is curiously resistant to female penetration, by analyzing signs of gender in the engineered objects, the robots, or Lucy Suchmans (2009) model (in)organisms. In following a grounded theory research methodology (Bryman 2008), my thesis was formed after the initial data collection. Robot names in competitions appeared to be a useful fulcrum by which to lever meaning out of the raw scientific field of robot research. Many interesting names and attributes appeared, worth following up with stronger experimental or quantitative research. For instance, the majority of robots in competitions were named and many robots were gendered as well. Names reflected human/machine hybridity, as well as anthropomorphism. The names demonstrate interesting levels of subjectification using Foucaults term (1985), in even the least anthropomorphic or lifelike of robots. Some specific details emerged, within gendered names,
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the male robots are both more dominating and more talkative than the female robots and size does appear to contribute to the personification of a robot. Overall, this data supports the robot as a new ontological category hypothesis (Kahn Jr. et al), and further poses the questions, how does this come about and what does that mean? Robots are used to model human, but the differences can create an endlessly recursive error, a strange loop (Hofstadter 2007). Donna Haraway has made interspecies translation her specialty and so I knit this investigation of a new being becoming into her cats cradle both figuratively and methodologically. My companions in this thesis, alongside many factual and fictional robots, are Heideggers being, Hegels slave, Suchmans model (in)organisms, Bourdieus scientific field, Groys archive, Davis-Floyds birth rituals, Kripkes dubbing, Searles indefinite speech acts, Althussers interpellation, Cheshers invocation, Corazzas anaphora, Barthes image, Latours Great Divides, Pratts contact zones, Derridas animot and Haraways worlding. My conclusion is that robot naming in competitions is a performance of companion species co-shaping in the contact zone between organic/technic, master/slave and subject/object, supporting the robots as new ontological category hypothesis. Robot naming demonstrates human-robot social relationships and both slave, pet and hybrid naming characteristics. My thesis suggests that competitions function as a birth rite of passage, and that naming dubs or introduces the new being to the world and vice versa. This thesis has come from khora to anaphora, from slave to companion, from regard to respect and perhaps from kin to kind.

New Ontological Category Hypothesis
Classical ontology is the definition of basic categories of being. The new ontological category hypothesis in human-robot interaction put forward at the 2011 conference on HumanRobot Interaction by a group which includes roboticists Hiroshi Ishiguro, Takayuki Kanda and psychologist Peter Kahn Jr, is that the attributes that people ascribe to robots do not mirror reasoning about canonical living entities such as humans, non-human animals, or artifacts. This leads to the hypothesis of an emerging new ontological category alive/not alive to distinguish robots from other beings (Kahn Jr et al. 2011). This builds on the earlier work of Turkle (1984), and Reeves & Nass (1996), who have found that humans consistently respond to computers as alive/not alive in a way that differs to all our previous experience. Living and not living are canonical categories that even young children consistently identify and yet robots cannot be clearly placed in one or the other (Kahn Jr et al. 2011). Leila Takayama describes this difference between what we do and what we think as inthe-moment reaction and reflective cognition (2011). We are consciously aware that the machine is not biological or alive but we behave as if it is. Her phenomenological stance is that the ontological category is not important. Actions and reactions are all that can be known. Kahn Jr et al. (2011) use phenomenology to support the weak ontological position, if it walks like a duck, rather than the strong ontological position as described by Searle (1980), who argues in his Chinese Room paradigm for an actual being, even if it is not knowable. The increasingly embodied and autonomous qualities of robotic systems provide a discrete peg on which to hang the new ontological category hat. The definition of robot here is a human or animal-like robot by virtue of body, mobility, autonomy or social role, rather than a computer or robotic system that is distributed, disguised, multi-purposed and discreet.
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The survey of robot names in competitions shows many hybrid names that marry the categories of alive and machine, human and non-human, e.g. Elbot, Robo-goat and MikeRobot. This supports the NOC or new ontological category hypothesis. Kahn Jr et al (2011) suggest that the new ontological category is emergent, and this emerging quality is supported by the proportion of hybrid names compared to other names in the robot names survey. While some robot names clearly display hybrid ontology, many more robots are named in ways which display torque, Bowker and Stars term for the tectonic plates of conflicting categories (1999:27-28 cited in Haraway 2008:134). Many robot names express full personification even in highly mechanical forms of robot and competition, or full mechanization even in highly social forms of robot and competition. This is indicative of the lack of tradition of robot naming, and supports the emerging NOC hypothesis as necessarily liminal, a work in progress. These fault lines may be intriguing contact zones of future study, for example, what role does gender or size play in the human-robot competition partnership? The opposition to robots as a new ontological category is primarily grounded in the western philosophical separation of subject and object, in which subject trumps object by means of biology, sentience, cognition, knowing, intention, feeling and power. Tellingly, humans also still have trouble granting equal subject status to other humans, let alone non-human actors or artifactual ones. Jacques Derrida saw the question of the animal, or animal-machine as fundamental to the construction of the western philosophical subject, speaking for 10 days at Cerisy in 1997 on The Autobiographical Animal, his deconstruction of the inherently logocentric Cartesian tradition of the animal-machine without language and without response (2008:119 cited in Haraway 2008:306). Critically, Derrida did not just engage with philosophy, he encountered his cat:
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The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isnt the figure of a cat. It doesnt silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables. (1997, 2008:6 cited in Haraway 2008:19)
Derrida felt a presence, something that had a unique material existence and an individual relation with him. The key question Derrida identified in And Say the Animal Responded (2008:126), an excerpt from Cerisy, is not can a cat speak, think or feel, but how can anything know what constitutes a response and then how to respond accordingly, ethically and logically. Haraway extends the implications of Derridas insight to all companion species, both animal and artifactual, in When Species Meet (2008), her post-phenomenological ark full of materialsemiotic things, hybrids and cyborgs, companion species, kind and kin in mutually constituted relations. She weaves a cats cradle of fellow travellers together, Freud, Marx, Derrida, Latour, Suchman, Barad, Ihde, Thompson, Smutts, even Deleuze and Guattari. My thesis refers both to these original works and to Haraways interpretations. Haraways philosophy of encounters and becomings is particularly apt for analysis of robot competitions, an emergent ontology seen phenomenologically. Having extended being to all things via Latours pragmatic things as material, specific, non-self-identical and semiotically active (2005, cited in Haraway 2008:250), she contends that the smallest unit of being is therefore the relation. Robot competitions consist of many pairs or teams of human-robot
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partnerships working with and against each other. The robots are not figures or allegories but unique specific actual robots. The partnerships do not pre-exist the entangled semiotic-material encounters. Neither partner can function in this arena without each other. Although the power and autonomy is inequitably distributed, the robot is not completely under the control of the human partners. Every robot competition is full of stories of deviations from the plan, some successful, some not. In Human-Machine Reconfigurations, Lucy Suchman (2007) describes plans as explanations for what actually happened, or was intended to happen. Rather than a plan being a set of steps leading to an action, they are stories or rhetorical devices for communicating situations and goals. Plans are not performed, but a performance may occasionally go to plan. As Haraway says of her companion species, actual encounters are what make beings; this is the ontological choreography described by Charis Thompson (2005, cited in Haraway 2008:67). The secondary objection to acceding ontological status to robots is the authenticity of the social relations we engage in with them, perhaps more so with robots than to any other categoryin-question. According to Sherry Turkle (2006), the first debate in robotics was the degree of intelligence that was possible. As both the debate and robot intelligence and sophistication have evolved, the issue has become one of authenticity, whether or not human-robot relations can be real or are founded upon deception. As Coekelbergh (2011a) points out, this is paradoxical. If robots do not provide a strong quasi-other experience, then they cannot deceive (2011a:200). As in the Turing test, the ability to deceive is an indication of actual ontological success. Deception need not be intentional, or even intelligent. As social creatures, we engage in social relations with robots regardless. That the majority of robots in robot competitions have been given names supports the sneaky success of human-robot social relations in what Nass et al. (1994) called the Computers as Social Actors theory.
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Finally, the argument that robots are a new ontological category rests not just on the dissolution of the human exceptionalism criteria and the evidence of actual social relations, but on the emergent nature of both the category and the robots. A robot is neither a stable entity nor a fixed species. While the stability and speciesness of all beings can be called into question, the evolution of robot is significantly rapid. In the 1990s, Kismet was constructed as one of a new class of socially intelligent autonomous robots, designed to change. Kismets control architecture facilitates social forms of learning that enables Kismet to influence its social world to maintain its internal agenda (Breazeal 1999). An increasing number of robots are constructed to have goals involving interaction with humans. Social performance is one of the tested categories at robot competitions. Changing categories in competitions reflect robot evolution. Our robot building skills are improving. Although Ishiguros Geminoids are almost human in some ways, they trail a lengthy evolutionary tail. Small robots that self assemble, chatbots and virtual agents who converse, mobile household toys which work and robots who learn are taking all sorts of shapes around us. This potential was described by Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985, 1991:152):
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, selfdeveloping and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
This is a specific tale of the agility team that is robot and engineer(s) performing a partnership in robot competitions, as witnessed by name and category records. This is an emergent relationship with a new being or thing (Latour 2005). This is a process of birth and it is attended by ritual as all life crises are in human society. Robotics competitions are one of the mechanisms or rituals of this emergent form. Participation in competitions is an important rite of passage for robots in validating their construction/ideal/ontology.
Figure 1. University of NSW 2 Legged League RoboCup team from 2008.
The Birth of a Robot in Competition

Rites of Passage
Sociologists and anthropologists since Durkheim have studied the major life transitions that are ritualized in rites of passage. Birth, puberty, marriage and death are known as the lifecrisis rites (Turner 1969). These rites highlight and validate changes in a persons status and are characterized by three stages, separation, transition, and reincorporation (Van Gennep 1909). The stages are not equal, dependent on the occasion. Birthing rites focus on liminal transition and introduction. Liminality is a period of ambiguity characterized by tests. Robot competitions function as a rite of passage, transforming an undetermined entity to a categorized entry aiming at the successful completion of categorical imperatives. Birth is an obvious metaphor for the emergence of new ontological category, but the birth of a robot faces several obstacles. Firstly, the technical trespasses on the essentially natural, where birth is a product of flesh and blood. The second obstacle is the modeling of human that underpins the creation of these model (in)organisms (Suchman in press). Finally, the gendering of technological relations has a tradition of womens work being appropriated by male hands, so giving birth to robots risks trivializing the role of women and extracting the surplus value from the labor of production. The first argument can be countered both philosophically and pragmatically. For example, Suchman (in press) argues that the human/machine divide is no more an a priori than that between human and animal, leveraging recent theories in ANT, feminism and posthumanism. Also, in praxis, robots are being created to model human therefore birth is a
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fitting figuration. The robot can serve as a model for the Human insofar as its existence is framed as elucidating universally applicable truths about how humans work. (Suchman in press). In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing (1950: 456 cited by Suchman in press p17) proposed juvenile robots instead of adult models, suggesting that a childs brain could then be educated appropriately into an adult. Since then child-like learning robots have proliferated, from Kismet and Mertz, to Asimo and iCub. Suchman and Keller (2007 cited by Suchman in press) both point out the circular logic inherent in this common rationale behind building robots, in which the ability to reproduce human behaviors is taken as evidence that the underlying mechanisms are the same. Rodney Brooks, who Suchman (in press) describes as the grandfather of the robot Mertz, by academic lineage at least, is a proponent of this view. His position, that humans are essentially machines (Brooks 2002), is the logical extension of the dominant rational scientific paradigm that has informed research since the enlightenment, that facets of human structure and behavior can be separated, recreated and studied in models. Generalizing from a model is epistemologically fraught. Knowledge gained is knowledge of a particular class of (in)organism rather than knowledge of a class of phenomena (Keller 2000, 2002). The final objection to birth as metaphor for robot competitions is the introduction of gender relations to apolitical technology. Sidestepping the views of Winner (1980) and Latour (1992, 2004), that artifacts always have politics, robotics is a remarkably male dominated industry. This is not unusual in the areas of hard science, large industry and the military. Change in the gendering of industry and academia has reached the biological sciences more quickly than the physical ones. Mobilizing the metaphor of birth risks naturalizing the strong and studied
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engineering talents of many female researchers, although it opens the doors for the sharing of a nurturing role in ways that may be fruitful. Cynthia Breazeal (2000) describes her role with Kismet as like a caretaker for an infant. Turkle (2006) famously noted references to Cynthia as Kismets mother, while mentions of the fathers of robots are few and far between. As sex is irrelevant to mothering a robot, there may be interesting gender roles to play. The figuration of birth may go further. Morana Alacs (2009) body-in-interaction paradigm describes a process of corporealization, in which human-robot teams enact each others bodies, in mutual physical constitution. Alac tracks scientists gesture in the acquisition and employment of skills to trace how the conception of the body as a discrete and unified entity disintegrates through practice (Alac 2009:492). She observes roboticists using their own body movements to model robot movements, articulating alien joints. The social body is dynamic and multiparty, a body-in-interaction (Alac 2009:492). The roboticist feels the movement of the robots body in his body (Alac 2009:511), making birth an apt metaphor. Human labor produces life in a robot body. The process of corporealization involves real bodies but is tropic, and historically specific at every layer of its tissues as Donna Haraway (1997:142) explains it in her work on genetics. The planes of bodily categorization are both dynamic and situated. In a robot competition, the prepared body is introduced to society. A rite of passage serves not just to introduce something in to the world but to bring them into alignment with society, to bring the world into them. Robot competitions, scientific publications and the scientific demonstration, each have their own rituals for bringing subjects into being according to our core values as a technocratic society, where power is based on technology, knowledge and skill. Much work in the Science and Technology Studies field has
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focused on the role of the lab in the generation of model (in)organisms, the production of difference in subject objects and the stabilization of entities. Less attention has been paid to the relatively mundane ways in which the production of both meaning and machine are then validated and moved into the world (Suchman in press). The mundane or everyday is an oddly amorphous and vacuous term as Lefebvre (1947) and Felski (1999) point out, impossible to define except in contrast to some specialized significance, which is extracted from it and recategorized as something else. The everyday is associated negatively with class, race and gender. It is both democratic and impoverished. Suchman (in press) proposes that the scientific demonstration is one such everyday way of producing meaning. The demonstration is a product of the enlightenment period, performing the notion of seeing for oneself which is central to the origin myth of technoscientific objectivity (Suchman in press). I suggest that the robot competition is another mundane production, which enacts the ideals of democracy and quantification. Competitions are open to all and measurements and record keeping are fundamental, as they are to all modern sports. A robot competition is a sport, being both ritualized combat and organized play. This aligns with sociologist Allen Guttmanns (1979) theory of modern sport. In From Ritual to Record; The Nature of Modern Sport, Guttmann (1979) looked more closely at the role of sport in capitalism and cultural imperialism and found the genesis and subsequent migration of modern sports clearly paralleled the slow development of a mathematical, rational, empirical, experimental world-view. Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society symbolize not just the scientific revolution but the birth of modern sporting competitions.
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Figure 2. Gold medal offered as first prize in the Loebner Prize/Turing Test.
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Robot Competitions
Aside from enjoyment, robot competitions offer great value to roboticists. At one end of the spectrum are challenges like the DARPA Grand Challenge which offers a large prize but requires a huge investment of time and money, attracting only the wealthiest of institutional teams. At the other end of the spectrum are hobbyist competitions, ranging from local robot club meets to RoboGames, formerly known as RoboOlympiad. RoboGames is the largest robot competition in the world, excluding purely junior educational competitions like the First Lego League and RoboCup Junior. While RoboGames attracts thousands of spectators to the combots or combat robots, competition categories include art and navigation. RoboGames attracts large company sponsorship and includes an academic symposium. Other well-known competitions are FIRA, RoboCup, RoboOne, MicroMouse, IGVC (the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition) and there are many smaller local competitions. Some are organized by the military and closed to the public. Others are organized by individuals and open to all. Educational competitions are a huge subset of robot competitions that are not included in this survey. Many research robot competitions include junior events but the educational category has a different primary focus, that of inspiring future engineers. Competitions for chatbots like the Loebner prize and the Chatterbox Challenge have been included in this survey of robot competitions. Although the robots are virtual, not embodied, the naming, interactions and implications appear to be the same. The self-imposed division between robotics and AI is comparatively recent. The Loebner prize was the first recorded robot competition, designed to answer Turings (1950) question, Can Machines Think?.
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Robot competitions have developed from a long tradition of science and engineering challenges that provides a framework for Turings famous test. The potato may have remained a curiosity if not for a reward offered for anyone finding new sources of nutrition after the French famine of 1769. In the 1795, Napoleon offered a prize for advances in food technology leading to Apperts 1809 invention of a heat-sealing process that created the canning industry. Napoleon also founded the Volta prize in 1801 in honor of the Italian physicist. He offered 60,000 livres for the best work on the application of electricity, as well as several smaller annual sums. In 1807, although Britain and France were at war, the Grand Prize was awarded to British inventor Sir Humphrey Davy, for his work on electrolysis. Pasteurs ground-breaking work was largely funded by the prizes he won in his early career. Inventions and discoveries changed industry and society. The steam industry developed quickly courtesy of the Rainhill Trials, which offered 500 pound prize money. The trial provided a highly publicized and effective testing ground for steam engines, leading to the purchase and contract of Stephensons winning entry Rocket for the new Liverpool & Manchester railway, the worlds first passenger line. Originally planned as a goods line, its popularity with people was unexpected. At least 10 major prizes for aviation were offered between 1900 and 1920, from flying an airship around the Eiffel Tower to flying across the Channel, crossing the US, then the Atlantic and finally flying from England to Australia, which took the winner, Capt. Smith 27 days to accomplish in 1920. The prize for nonstop flight across the Atlantic wasnt won until 1927, when Charles Lindbergh made the trip non-stop in the Spirit of St Louis. Remarkable industrial progress has been made in a comparatively short time as direct result of competitions.
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Challenges and competitions play an important role in governance and scientific development too. The term Grand Challenge was formalized in US policy in the 80s, in response to Japans 5th generation 10 year plans. Currently, the most widely known Grand Challenges are DARPAs autonomous vehicle challenge and the Google Lunar X Prize. There are more than 71 science competitions listed in Wikipedia (2011), plus an additional 113 robot competitions on the site that R. Steven Rainwater (2011) has been maintaining since bulletin board days.
"A grand challenge is a fundamental problem in science or engineering, with broad applications, whose solution would be enabled by the application of high performance computing resources that could become available in the near future. {"A Research and Development Strategy for High Performance Computing", Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, November 20, 1987}
Robotics is a rapidly evolving field and one of the fastest growing industries in the world, with estimated global market of $127 billion dollars in 2011, and with a growth rate of 25-40% across all areas (RobotWorld 2010; IFR 2010). The field covers industrial, military, domestic, service and research robotics. From the first fixed robotic arms to the sophisticated surgical systems of today, most robots bear no resemblance to the anthropomorphic robots of fiction. As computing power has increased, mobile or autonomous robots are becoming more frequent, but the majority of robots are vehicles or modeled on insects and animals rather than humanoids. The ISO 8373 (1994) standard definition of a robot is so broad that microwave ovens and coffee makers could be considered robots (Schultz 2010). While the definition of a robot can stretch
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from something that replaces humans to something that looks human, for most research purposes the definition has become something both situated and embodied (Moravec 2009). A situated device senses and is responsive to its environment. An embodied device has some way of acting in the world. A GPS is situated but not embodied. A coffee maker is embodied but not situated. As roboticist Rodney Brooks (2002) defines it, a robot senses the world in some way, does some sort of computation, decides what to do, and then acts on the world outside itself as a result. Clearly, the definition of a robot changes over time. A robot is liminal. One way of testing the current boundaries of what constitutes a robot are robot competitions, which form a social field generating scientific capital. Bourdieu (1977) defined the social field as an arena in which individuals and institutions struggle for resources, in an attempt to distinguish themselves and acquire capital in forms that are useful within the arena. This is the idea of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991). Bourdieu, like Weber, recognized that money and power are not the sole arbiters of dominance, separating their conflict analysis from Marxist class theory (Waters 2010). Bourdieu (1977, 1992) extended the social field concept to the scientific field. The scientific field is semi-autonomous, is structured in opposition to economic power, requiring a strict entrance fee and demanding rigorous peer evaluation (Bourdieu 1977). As each field differs, so the conflicts within each field are resolved by different means. Competitions are designed to push the envelope scientifically, attracting investment and interest. They are a form of peer review publishing demonstrating progress in basic problems, and a way of standardizing developments across multiple sites (Bonasso & Dean 1997). Robotics competitions are also a method of achieving recognition, a key element of scientific capital that enables claims and arguments to be noticed. [Sismondo 2011]
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In this scientific arena, the robot competition also functions as an archive, an evaluative process. Far from being a dusty dead end, the idea of an archive is one of active involvement in determining which innovations succeed and which are shelved. Publications are not the only tool of the technological archive. There are calls for standardized benchmarks in robotics research (Del Pobil 2006) due to difficulty of assessing paper quality in a fast changing field, lack of published methods and the inability of journals to report timely results for shared practice, contributing to unrepeatable and divergent research and the difficulty of comparing experimental results over the variety of systems both software and hardware. (Del Pobil 2006) Del Pobil (2006) points out that robotics competitions are one of the areas of practice in which systematic benchmarking takes place, which allows for the wide dissemination of scientific research and may be why competitions are increasingly popular. Competitions serve several purposes including education, entertainment, influence and setting a standardized bench mark for research. Both the competition and the robots competing in it are a particular form of scientific capital which functions as a technological archive, using Foucaults concept of an archive as the historical definition of a discursive formation (Rammert 1999, Groys 1999). In The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1966, 1969) treats science as knowledge and knowledge as a set of discursive practices, rather than an idea. Knowledge is formed through discursive formations or epistemic shifting relations (Foucault 1969). The archive is the general system of the formulation and transformation of statements, in which boundaries are drawn between the interior and exterior of the archive that construct a historical narrative (Foucault 1969). This concept was developed further by Derrida (1995), Groys (1999) and Rammert (1999). Archivists, such as curators and critics do not passively
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record and as such, their role in innovation is underrated. (Rammert 1999) The archive is the moment in time that captures what is then constructed as a history that calls forth a future. The archive is continually changing. The technological archive is the material, not memory that orders the unruly present. The past is not memory but the archive itself, something that is factually present in reality. (Groys 1999) The robot is technological archive, mediating a set of practices and knowledges. The competition is another archive or evaluative process resulting in the rise of particular robots and robotic practices, interpellating a particular human-robotic future. Robot competitions have an important role in the production of knowledge, scientific capital and innovation. As Rammert (1999:7) asserts: Technological innovations cannot simply be explained by rational economic choices or by criteria of higher technological efficiency. They are characterized by a relation of "creative destruction (Schumpeter 1942 cited by Rammert 1999:7). Technics, our technologies and techniques, make it possible to engage in this researchcreation (Murphie 2008:2). Although it is impossible to achieve closure, technics imposes temporary order (Murphie 2008). Robot competitions have strong political, economic and social rationale, as evidenced by their role in global policy, institutional prestige and scientific capital building. Robot competitions both constrain and encourage innovation as technological archives in a process of research-creation. As such a robot competition is an important ritual in the birth of robot species. Participation in publications, demonstrations or competitions seems requisite for the acknowledgement of a robot and as Haraway (2008:26) says, It is all extremely prosaic, relentlessly mundane, and exactly how worlds come into being.
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Rituals of Birth
Symbolic interactions or rituals are at the heart of all social dynamics, generating group identity, belief and culture. These patterns are the most basic structural force that organizes society (Summers-Effler 2006:135) Rituals provide ordered structure to the chaotic flow of the natural birth process particularly in the scientific atmosphere of modern birth. Ritual serves to contain and control the process of birth, and to transform the birthing woman into an American mother who has internalized the core values of this society (Davis-Floyd 1993a, 1993b,1994). These core values are of rationality, technology and patriarchy, according to Davis-Floyd in Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1993b) and the mother is the primary figure responsible for transmitting them. My argument here is that robot competitions are a ritual in robot birth and turn roboticists into rational mothers in company with their progeny. In the course of a ritual, cognitive restructuring is accomplished. In competitions like RoboGames and RoboCup, human-robot teams arrive in a liminal, transitional state. The preliminary rite of passage stage, farewelling the old status, is not a pronounced feature of birth rites in comparison to the liminal transitional stage and subsequent incorporation. Initially competitors exist in non-hierarchical equality, deprived of external status, as comrades (Turner 1967). The democratic mythology of a level playing field is one of the defining appeals of competition. Human-robot teams are separated from their mundane life. They enter the competition, often in advance of the event, nominating their category. Forms are filled out, entry fees are paid. Rules must be scrutinized and courses memorized. Symbols of the separation of competitors from the mundane world are in the use of separate entrances, wearing a particular lanyard, badge or wristband and having access to a
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separate workspace or pit for the duration of the competition. The goal is of course to win medals, symbolizing the value of human-robot work in succeeding in their chosen category. Although the power relationship is unequal and the robot does not choose the sport, the robot has some say in the categories and results. The robot affords certain choices more than others through size, weight, sensors, structure or software and rarely seems to be as reliable as a robot is reputed to be. Rituals also provide access to a mythological dimension that is quirkily present in secular robot competitions. Mythic technophilia, in which prehistoric fire worship, the applauding of sparks, shocks, flames and all things steam punk coexists with the material arms race for swifter, higher, stronger components. The names selected for robots, like Thor, Zeus and Achilles, or Iorek, Julie Tinkerbell and Captain Jack Sparrow, also directly reflect the mobilization of many mythologies.
Figure 3. Images from the header of the RoboGames website.

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Rituals utilize repetition, order, formality, staging, affectivity and intensification all to effect a cognitive reduction and stabilization. Competitors may travel long distances to attend competitions, severing most ties with normal life. They may group together in transit, dorms, hotels and dinners. The large numbers of competitors doing the same thing continually reinforce the core messages. This messaging is assisted by comperes, video screens enlarging and disseminating competition bouts, with scores and tallies being shown in printouts pinned to the wall, on flashers, and projected large above the audience. The audience is frequently in-group, consisting only of other competitors or officiators and facilitators, ensuring a unity of purpose. But some competitions, like RoboGames, attract quite a crowd, primarily for the dramatic combat robots. Combat robots highlight the constructed nature of categories. The Super Heavyweight combat class does not take place on site due to safety. Robots any larger or deadlier than that may be misconstrued as an act of warfare. Similarly robots that are too small keep disappearing from the program, perhaps literally. Competitions serve as a way of constraining our attention to approximately human shaped and sized robots over which we demonstrate mastery.
Figure4. Competitors at a Micromouse competition.

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Competitions serve a process of both preserving the status quo and effecting social change through the use of the ritual format. For Haraway (2008:164-165), the agility competition poses a fundamental ontological challenge. When facing the authenticity of actual robot performance and meeting the robot partner on the competition arena, in the open, we ask who or what are you, and so what do we become? (Heidegger 1947, Agamben 2003, cited by Haraway 2008:220-221). At this point, a robot is a khora, Derridas (1995b) term for a nonname, a placeholder for absent meaning and no identity. After birth, our concerns pass from liveness to gender to name. Human-robot mothers have not been slow to answer. Robots receive an anaphora (Corazza 2004), an indexical yet unique name. Almost every robot in competition has had their name registered. This shows a significant level of naming in robots that are largely not designed for social purposes. Heidegger (1927) believed that access to Dasein or Being-inthe-World was only possible after naming, or at least the articulation of intelligibility. This incorporation as a new named being is the final stage of the birth rite of passage, in which robot becomes acknowledged, roboticist is remade as mother or companion, and the human-robot companion species is mutually constituted.
Figure 5. Playing with robots.
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The Original Question; Gender or Name?

Some Theories of Naming
Names are fundamental to identification, categorization and cognition. Whether or not robots belong to new ontological categories, we name them. Heidegger (1947:193) said that Language is the house of the truth of being. Naming may shape both a robots future identity and us as well. In Shelleys Frankenstein, the monster rebels against the inhumanity of the humans who refuse to name him and thus make a monster of him. To bear a name becomes the symbol of humanity. The monsters plea, accord me that which even the meanest of humans has called for a regard, a measure of respect as a being. The request for a mate comes as the rejected nameless monster desperately grasps at nonhuman solutions, anything that might care for him and look at him with something other than loathing. Frankenstein is a story of kin and kind. Frankensteins monster does not seek revenge but just regard. By destroying all of Frankensteins kin, the monster hopes to kindle a sense of companionship, to create in Frankenstein feelings of kind towards the monster that ought to have been given to the monster at birth. The nameless monster is called into subjectivity as inhuman, interpellated in Althussers language, by the actions of inhuman humans. In that regard, it is perhaps fortunate that most humans name robots. The question is, what do the names we give them mean? My thesis is that robot naming practices are closer in kind to slave and companion animal naming practices than to either ordinary human or object naming practices.
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The Semantics of Naming
The question what is a name? has troubled philosophers, linguists and onomasts from Plato to the present day. How many Alices are there? Are they unique or general, contextual or historical? John Stuart Mill (1843 cited by Cummings 2009) is credited with the first modern theory of names in A System of Logic, in which he proposed that a name is a direct referent, denotation rather than connotation. The Frege-Russell view countered with strong arguments for the connotative or descriptive meaning of names (Cummings 2009). I take a pragmatic approach here and collect features of the dominant paradigms together which attempt to avoid the underlying contested concepts. The level of debate over what a name is or does also suggests that the emergence of the new ontological category of robot may be liminal. I take a Millian view here, as interpreted by Kripke (1980 cited in Cummings 2009), that a name is a unique identifier, which further has ritual elements in its bestowal. Through some birth, dubbing or baptism process, which can include registration, the general name becomes specific. Kripke (op cit) holds that this is the point at which meaning is made, and in a causal chain additional meanings then accrete to it. In this analysis, a name is understood to have a descriptive component, both in Searles (1958 cited in Cummings 2009) cluster of connotations and in Kripkes (op cit) causal-historical chain. In Searles (op cit) view, associations are collected cultural meanings; Aristotle is a philosopher. Whereas in the causal-historical chain, Aristotle is the philosopher I am reading (Kripke op cit). These claims are causal or contextual depending on my knowledge of each claim. Both views have trouble explaining cases where no direct relationship to the named person/thing exists, or indeed when the named person/thing, e.g. Atlantis does not exist (Cummings 2009).
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Sommers asserts that at the moment of ceremonial giving, a name becomes a special duty pronoun developing the name as an anaphor concept (1982 cited in Cummings 2009). Peirce had previously described the first use of a name as the genuinely indexical moment, after which it becomes an icon and eventually a symbol (1903), although Wittgenstein pointed out the general confusion between name and bearer (1953 cited in Corazza 2004). Corazza (2004) has further developed the anaphoric view, that a name can both have content value and function as an indexical placeholder. It allows for the use of a name without the direct knowledge of the referent. (Corazza 2004, cited in Cummings 2009). Aristotle is dead but Aristotle is not. The anaphora fulfills the same function as Derridas (1995b) khora, but in an opposite way. The khora is a prelinguistic womb, a placeholder free of meaning, deconstructing the social framework. The anaphora is a placeholder for many meanings, semantically as proposition and referent. Aristotle and Alice are multiple unique beings. The anaphora is both indexical and highly specific (Kaplan 1989 cited in Cummings 2009). The anaphora is bestowed in a privileged rite, the dubbing or first use, after which causal and historical meanings accrete. Where the khora is absence, the anaphora is a relational presence, a mutually constituted subject object (Suchman in press). Language does more than describe things; it does things. (Chesher 2001:309). Austin (1962 cited in Chesher 2001:310) defines speech acts as being either locutionary, illocutionary or perlocutionary, where the locutionary part is the utterance and the illocution is the intent communicated, wielding a large amount of nonverbal, personal and cultural weight, as Bourdieu described it (1991:75 cited in Chesher 2001:311). The perlocutionary act is the response or effect. Language acts extend beyond the spoken. Money is a promise made paper. A purchase
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ends in a perlocutionary act. You receive a product (Chesher 2001:311). Searles theory of indirect speech acts elaborated on Austins theory of speech acts. Searles (1969) theory of indirect speech builds on the cluster of connotations by examining the ways in which language and names are used. The premise is that every utterance has cultural and contextual significance. First the potential for action is acknowledged then invoked, resulting in an incorporeal transformation, as Chesher (2001:312) explains it: Before I make any request, the circumstances that make it possible for me to say it are already in place. This understanding of the power of language and its inextricability from the world contributed to Foucaults (1969) idea of discursive formation and Butlers (1993) performativity. Closer to the relationship of robots to language is Chris Cheshers (2001) concept of computers as invocationary media which addresses the way in which computational devices, thus by extension robots, have masqueraded as others but at core have a series invocational language/power acts, firstly as the collection of device invocations and secondly as the human/computer interaction calling many media forms into being. The many small acts of invoking or human calling that take place have a slight delay and opacity in which the computer is present, acting or speaking. The concept of masquerading from Deleuze (1986:2-3 cited in Chesher 2001:5) suggests that we cannot initially know a computer, or robot. Our knowledge is anaphoric or place-holding. When speaking of cinematic theory, Deleuze said that the essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured. Something new is judged by existing standards. This connection between robots and cinema is returned to.
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Robots masquerade as slaves, pets or machines. These are the names we invoke them with. And robot invocations are vocational. This play on robots being named for labor recognizes that embodiment creates limits rather than liminal conditions. For creatures of infinite promise, robots becoming is tied to the economic, material and social conditions of production. Mark Coekelbergh (2011b) draws on Searle and Wittgenstein to argue that the way that we talk both about and to robots co-shapes our relationship to them. Language partially constructs social relations, which have a quasi-objective reality that can only be mediated through language (Coekelbergh 2011b). Does language triumph like Platos horse driver? Or is embodiment more fundamental as both Brooks (2002) and Barthes (1981) contend in their different fashions? Neither view dominates in what Wittgenstein (1953) describes as forms of life. The way we do things, our culture and our form of life is shaped by language. In this respect naming can interpellate, not just invoke. Where Cheshers invocation is a small calling, bringing a technological assemblage into life, Althussers interpellation calls a subject into an ideology (1971:162 cited in Chesher 2001:69). Robot naming in competitions starts as a simple invocation, a functional request but becomes the creation of a subject identity. Whether we want to create human-like robots or whether we simply respond to robots in a human fashion, the robot is being called into being. Names have meanings that may never have been intended. It is also important to note that in the tradition of naming non-human actors, both biological and machinic, names are assigned by humans and not assigned by the object, subject or entity itself, which is par for the asymmetrical power relations in our human centered world.
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The Naming of Things
Historically, some things have been named more than others. Cities, ships and storms have a public nature, redolent of tradition. Places have unique names that direct us. Ships and storms share a metaphysical role. We hope to bargain with fate by personifying our relationship to nature. Gender also figured in our understanding of ships and storms, in western culture, both being resolutely female, until recent years. However robot names do not have the same gravity or tradition. They are still thing like. Studies of inanimate things have shown that we gender our relationships first, then name. For instance, two studies of car drivers (Benfield et al. 2006) showed that half of all drivers attributed gender to their vehicles and a further gave their vehicles names. This reflects the difference between using a personal pronoun that is gendered and creating a unique name, so it is no surprise that more people start identity work with generic terms. Perhaps the surprise is that the studies found that increased anthropomorphism was linked with increased road rage, depending on the attributed character of the car. And, as the authors point out, the surprise is also that no one said, Naming a car is a stupid idea! (Benfield et al. 2006). In these studies, more cars were female than male, however more participants were also female. Car names ranged from the clearly gendered Contessa and Herbie to the playfully mechanical, like The Sweatbox of Death and the Silver Bullet. A study of Bluetooth devices (Kindbergh & Jones 2007) also shows a very high number of named devices, primarily phones, although the focus of the study is on the ways in which naming practices contribute to a partially embodied technological relation. There is a culture of naming Bluetooth devices in the UK and due to the short range, 10-100m, the presence of a
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named device indicates personal presence and mobility. Scanning in 3 city locations found that between 50% and 90% of devices had a user generated name (op cit). Subsequent participant interviews indicated that more people (70%) named their phones as part of setting it up rather than when they required a unique identifier to transfer files (30%). Nearly half the names given labeled the phone as some part of the person. Most of the other names expressed statements about the person or the group that they and phone were in. Very few phone names gave the device a separate identity. Names incorporated txting symbols and puns, showing they functioned as a message more than a call.
The Naming of Pets
A significant feature of pet naming is that we call the name, frequently, out loud. Pet names are usually also gendered, in keeping with the gender of the animal, whereas animals in general are gendered regardless of their sex on the basis of our cultural perception of them (Lash & Polyson 1987). Some studies have also found relationships between our perception of gender in animals and our self-perception (Allemang 2001). Similarly, the use of animal imagery reinforced gender and racial boundaries indicating the need for more attention to the non-human in sociological studies (Lerner & Kalof 1999). Companion animals are the animals most frequently named and studied (Harris 1998). There is a playful or ludic component to pet naming. Pet names are full of jokes and personal history/context, and heroic or ridiculous names abound. Human names are comparatively limited and traditional compared to the flamboyance and eclecticism of pet names (Harris 1998). Pet names are informal with minimal registration or liability. They are spoken, vernacular and profane. They can change. They are a sentimental language that we show no
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shame in using. Harris (1998) also talks of the role that pet names play in our computer/internet/atm passwords, reflecting one of the relationships we wish to have with our technology, while the other relationship is saying fuckewe. Finally, there is an invocative magical dimension to pet names and passwords, e.g. Bhappy, Me27.
The Naming of People
Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt conducted a large-scale audit of names from the California Birth registry that was popularized in Freakonomics (Fryer & Levitt 2004, Levitt & Dubner 2005). The inclusion of racial data, parental occupation and zip code in the data enabled socio economic inferences to be drawn, primarily because the data was studied over a period of 4 decades. There study showed the presence of a small pool of popular names that changes over time, with people in lower socio economic neighborhoods following the naming practices of wealthier people. The exception is the increase in uniquely black names that has occurred since the early 70s that may be related to the rise of the Black Power movement, as in the 60s there was no significant difference in naming practices. The California name data also points to clear gender differences in names, with a similar mobility as socioeconomic status. Boys are never given female names, but some male names are appropriated for female children e.g. Beverley, Mackenzie and Paris. Lieberson et al. (2000) have studied the instability of androgynous names and find that liminal names eventually become fixed at the lower status. Very few people would name their son Paris these days.
The Naming of Slaves
The naming of slaves has been well studied by historians, some of whom theorized that African naming practices in the Americas were signs of cultural resistance to the domination of
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slavery (Handler & Jacoby 1996). Other historians, like Burnard (2001), find that closer examination of records and the name pool suggest that African names show evidence of assignation and are indicative of slave status rather than African identity. Characteristics of slave names are that they are singular, not compound, and do not reference kin. Slave names come from an eclectic lexicon not a traditional pool, although classical mythology and biblical names are prevalent. Naming can show evidence of individual features or events and places, which may resemble the Western African day names but the names selected still bear signs of assignation, for example, slaves named Cudjoe (Monday) who werent born on that day and slaves named for places in England. Herbert & Harper (2010) found that in the Caribbean the higher the status the smaller the name pool, with white men having least variety in first names and black women having the most. Another indication of the lack of choice and status in slave names is that almost all emancipated slaves changed their name (Morgan 1998). Their name choices reflected a desire for assimilation. Names selected were compound, very traditional and often bore no relation to the names of family or friends, nor of owners or benefactors. Cody (1982) addressed the importance of familial naming for slaves in the dispersal of estates and Burnard (2001) found that another reason for name changing and the acquisition of surnames on emancipation was the importance of having a traditional yet unique recorded identity for the ownership of property.
The Naming of Robots
Ownership and property will figure highly in the future of the naming of robots. But for now, few studies have considered the impact of robot names or gender except as the perception of or influence on the end users of social robots ie. Carpenter et al. (2009). Mark Coekelbergh
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(2011b) has considered our hermeneutic, normative linguistic practices with regards to robots, with a focus is on the transition from talking about robots, to talking to them, and questions what ethical and ontological claims that will make of us. Coekelbergh (2011b) suggests that human-robot interaction studies considers examining this aspect of social robotics further and suggests experimentally changing the pronouns used to describe or converse with robots, from he, she and it to you. That robots lack many obvious signs of gender suggests that a parallel with generic animal gendering practices is highly likely (Lerner & Kalof 1999), in which cultural qualities are assigned. A generic cat is frequently feminine due to culturally perceived qualities whereas a dog is masculine, until that is; a dogs actual biology intrudes on our imaginary.
The Importance of Naming
A dog is not just THIS dog but serves as a model for the abstract concept dog (and not a cat). Sandra Waxmans extensive research on language and concept acquisition, suggests the integration of word learning and conceptual development, which is supported by the increasing sophistication of cognitive studies (Arunachalam & Waxman 2010). While our penchant for categorization is extremely efficient, these cognitive shortcuts can have negative effects (Waxman 2004). Waxman (2002, 2004) has studied the inductive effect of naming. Understanding that something belongs in a category allows us to infer a much greater range of information than is immediately accessible to us, however, the category information can overwhelm perception of the individuals distinct and immediate character. This tradeoff extends from objects to social categories such as race and gender (Waxman 2010, Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). In a study of the attribution of gender and race characteristics in novel
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situations, Waxman (2010) has found that the use of proper names increases the use of social categorizations, proving that names can hurt. Names are at once our most personal and our most public possessions. We do not always own them. Our names direct, index, invoke and interpellate. Names create ontologies, taxonomies and typologies. Names give us status, functionally, legally and socially, as gendered, racial, socio-economical subjects or objects. Names place us in history, family and tradition and subvert from within. Names are ritual and referential. Names have power over us. Heidegger (1927) also said that man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. We invoke names constantly and by doing so we bring Named beings into the world. At the end of the Book of Practical Cats (1939), TS Eliot asks; How does one address a cat? Eliot reminds us that there are times and places, cats are cats and dogs are dogs, and some cats are more familiar to us than others, as we should have learnt through his volume of verse.
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The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn't just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all, there's the name that the family use daily, Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey - All of them sensible everyday names. There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter, Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames: Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter - But all of them sensible everyday names. But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular, A name that's peculiar, and more dignified, Else how can he keep his tail perpendicular, Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride? Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum, Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat, Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum - Names that never belong to more than one cat. But above and beyond there's still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess; The name that no human research can discover - But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name. - T.S. Eliot (from "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats")
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Case Study: Grey Walters Tortoises
Elsie and Elmer were the first modern robots, built by neurophysiologist, W. Grey Walter, in the 1940s and 50s as part of a series of tortoises modeling Walters theory of brain function. Elsie and Elmer were the bio-robotic pioneers of bottom up AI, in which biology is modeled to see what behaviors are possible, rather than the symbolic or top down approach, which is linguistic, descriptive and directive. Elsie and Elmer were phototropic or light following robots consisting of a 2 sensors, for light and touch and 2 motors, for movement and steering, coordinated by a 2 vacuum tube analog computer. Walter was modeling a 2 neuron simple nervous system. The tortii showed simple forms of approach and avoidance with the shell acting as a pressure sensor. Each tortoise carried a pilot light. The positive tropism to moderate light would encourage approach to light sources but the pressure switch and a negative tropism to both strong light and darkness would cause the tortoise to back away. This resulted in a fascinating mechanical minuet when one tortoise saw another tortoise, or saw its own image in a mirror (Boden 2006) as seen in Figure 6, below.
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Walter not only modelled biology but also deliberately used biological language to describe the result (Boden 2006). Elsie and Elmer were called tortoises both for their shape and in reference to the line in Alice in Wonderland; We called him tortoise because he taught-us. This whimsical and anthropomorphic approach to naming has been a feature of robotics ever since, as much as the biomimetic robotic concept has informed future robot generations. While imitating biology does not extend to creating sex in robots, gender has been assigned from the beginning. ELSIE is an Electro-mechanical robot, Light-Sensitive with Internal and External stability. Walters original prototype was dubbed ELMER (ELectro-MEchanical Robot). As well as his tortoises, Walter also produced IRMA, CORA and NERISSA. CORA (Conditioned Reflex ANalogue) was constructed out of a tortoise but was immobile and designed to model Pavlovian learning. CORA was modeled on an earlier circuit named NERISSA (Nerve Excitation, Inhibition and Synaptic Analogue). Walter believed that a combination of CORA and ELSIE would create a machine capable of action, reaction and learning. IRMA (Innate Releasing Mechanism Analogue) continued Walters interest in simple behaviors based modeling of complex mechanisms. IRMA was intended to respond to other robotic stimuli in a predictable fashion allowing for social or swarm behaviors. Walter looked forward to the evolution of miniature transistor based robots, lively little beetles, not slow tortoises. (Walter 1968 cited in Boden 2006) The refrain of associative names, gendered pairs, and habitual patterns crop up over and over in robot naming ie. Arne, Arnea (Russia). Elvis/Elvina (Sweden) , Adam&Artemis, Isaac&Albert, Shrimp/Cricket, Fish/Bird. This is essential to the operation of memory and the
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way we learn. The association of concepts allows for easy storage and retrieval and is displayed by associative neural networks (Eagleman & Montague 2002). Elsie and Elmer show a bottom up approach in their build and behaviors, but humans demonstrate a top down approach in their relations to the robots.
Figure 7. A tortoise returns to its house to recharge its battery.
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Case Study: Poppy Da Vinci
In 2000, Intuitive Surgical became the first company to gain US FDA clearance for a robotic surgical system, the Da Vinci system (Intuitive 2011). The world service robotics market is expected to reach more than $100 billion by 2020 (IFR 11), following hot on the heels of military and field robotics (mining, agricultural and industrial). Health care is the most lucrative sector of the service robotics industry. As pioneers in this sensitive and highly legislated sector, Intuitive and the hospitals purchasing Da Vinci systems, are aware of the need for good public relations and robotic image management. Robot naming competitions are very popular, and in 2006, Baltimore Washington Medical Centre named their new Da Vinci system, Poppy (BWMC 2006), which was the winning entry in a school name the robot competition.
Figure 8. The Da Vinci Surgical System and Da Vincis Vitruvian Man drawing.
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With its 4 extendible arms, the Da Vinci Surgical System brings to mind Da Vincis Vitruvian Man drawing, one of the most referenced images in the world. The Vitruvian man shows the ideal human proportions, illustrating the Renaissance belief that humanity was the model on which the rules of the universe rested. Many medical and scientific organizations use Renaissance imagery (Haraway 2008), capitalizing on the associated meanings of enlightened rational progress. The Da Vinci Surgical System uses telepresence and state of the art robotics to enable surgeons to perform complex and delicate surgery (Intuitive 2011). The secret of the Da Vincis success has been the illusion of transparency. Legally, the Da Vinci is an extension of the surgeon. Three forms of robot surgery are currently recognized, telesurgery, supervisory and shared control systems. A supervised system, like RoboDocs bone-milling system for orthopedic surgery is clearly a tool, which while precise and minimally invasive, has no ability to respond to change and so the surgeon prepares, programs and activates a process that they are ready to stop at any time. In a shared control system, robots augment the active human. The robot has power of veto if a surgeon works too close to a predetermined danger zone. Human activity is enhanced by haptic feedbacks and steadying platforms, reducing human error and discomfort. In a telesurgical system, like a Da Vinci, the surgeon operates hands and arms remotely or from a workstation, with the illusion that they are operating directly. This is largely a legal illusion, that the pioneering Da Vinci system had to maintain to be approved for operation in the USA. Surgeons are aware of the dance of agency operating here (Pickering 1995 cited in Rammert 1999), which Rammert defines as interobjectivity, the interrelationship of materials, technical practice, and use-relations. Ihde (1990) expanded on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to
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describe ways in which human-technological relations work, forming a scale from alterity to invisibility (Ihde). A prosthetic body, like the Da Vinci, extends human capabilities. The surgeon has better vision and more mobility than possible with human hands and eyes. Kathy Cleland (2010) uses Ihdes scale to illustrate how a prosthetic body is not a replacement for lost function but an enhancement. Cleland (2010) suggests that our extended capabilities change the nature and scale of human consciousness and subjectivity. Poppy, the Da Vinci highlights complex human-robot relations at work. Poppy was named by local elementary school children in a Name the Robot competition. The finalists were Matthews JTC 2000, Sarahs Poppy and Aspens Dr Rob. The winning name, Poppy, is the name of a flower (Old English) and currently the 28th most popular female name in the UK. Sarah, however, explained that she thinks of the robot as he and called him Poppy because the arms pop out (BWMC 2006). Poppy is a liminal name, the image of popping arms and surgical art as strong as a small girl and a red-blooded flower. Poppys identity is equally contested. Poppy is at times a he, she, it and even a you. On the door of the operating theatre hangs a sign - POPPY in progress. In the video of Poppys baptism or ceremonial name unveiling, Poppy is referred to as the Poppy by hospital staff, although the public is invited to a you relationship with he/she/it. And Poppy does not think of the surgeon, or of us, except in a highly controlled fashion.
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Robot Name Survey

Purpose
From 2010 to early 2011, I conducted a survey of the robot names recorded in the results of robot competitions. I limited the field to competitions which published results online and in English, and that had a comparatively large population of competitors from robotics research groups. In the tradition of a social shaping of technology belief (Mackenzie & Wajman 1999, 2010), I hypothesized that robotics, as a highly gendered research area, might be the site of implicitly gendered robots which could influence the early stages of development in ways not tested on end users in the study of social robotics (cite studies). Personal participation in robotics competitions and presence in robotics labs led me to believe that a rich culture of the casual personification of robots existed in parallel with a highly concrete assessment of robot capabilities. A large scale survey, along the lines of Fryers research on names, is the best way to ascertain what is generally being done, rather than what people think is being done (Bryman 2008). Content analysis of the collected data is a secondary analysis of informal statistics and offers the potential for longitudinal research in future (Bryman 2008). This is both very efficient in time and cost, and provides an unobtrusive data collection method, which is suitable for determining attitude through behavior (Bartneck 2008).
People deny interacting with computational systems as if they were people and yet they respond to computers in many ways that are remarkably similar to how they respond to people. (Reeves & Nass 1996 cited in Takayama 2011:2)
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The results for analysis totaled more than 2000 robot names taken from 5 major competitions spanning a period of 20 years, attracting competitors from around the world, although primarily the USA and the English speaking world. Junior or educational competitions were completely excluded from the survey as the shaping of technology education in schools involves a different question to my original hypothesis. In an educational context, conscious effort is extended towards making robots and robotics appealing to a wider range of students by use of names, decorations and similar strategies, which would nullify the implicit gendering hypothesis. This rich vein of name data from competitions has both influenced my interpretation and reshaped the initial hypothesis in a grounded theory approach. A grounded theory approach means that the initial hypothesis has been replaced by questions generated from the data (Bryman 2008). Many avenues for future research have been uncovered along the way. The robot name survey data supports the robots as new ontological category hypothesis of Kahn et al. (2011). Furthermore; robot names show the personification of machines and the mechanization of social robots. Gender is clearly attributed to robots through naming practices, as is human mastery over robots. I hypothesize that robot naming practices have more in common with companion animal or slave naming practices than with either free human or technological object naming practices. This has interesting implications for the future of humanrobot relations.
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Method
Sample
As robot competitions are a comparatively small phenomena, i.e. compared to studying representations of animals in TV advertising, the sample frame is as large as possible within the parameters. The survey collected the name of robot, name of builder (if available), country of origin and competition category for over 2000 robots from as wide a range of competitions as possible within the sample frame; robot names published online, in English and at competitions attended by university level competitors, rather than an educationally oriented school level competition. Not all competitions gave roboticists names, sometimes giving team or university names instead. Two major competitions were excluded. RoboCup only publishes team names not robot names and RoboOne does not publish results in English. Also excluded from the results were small competitions, which published fewer than 3 years of results, as potentially unreliable indicators of underlying culture.
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Figures 9, 10 & 11: Competitors in international ground vehicle competitions. In the end, results were recorded from 5 competitions that span a range of robot shapes, sizes and cultures, as shown in Table 1. RoboGames spans several categories of competition, with entrants from combat to entertainment, with a range of robot challenges in between. The IGVC or Independent Ground Vehicle Competition is specifically a navigation challenge involving autonomous vehicular robots. APEC MicroMouse is a navigation competition for small autonomous robots. The Chatterbox Challenge spans entertainment and conversation/passing for human. The Loebner Prize is specifically a conversation/passing for human competition. All these competitions are primarily held in the USA, with the exception of the Chatterbox Challenge, which is online, but attract a wide range of entrants from around the world and occasionally are held in other countries. Some online records were missing or incomplete and not all robots names are recorded as some competitions only record the medalists of place-getters.
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Table 1. Total of robot names from all competitions in survey. Total Names RoboGames IGVC APEC MicroMouse Chatterbox Challenge Loebner Prize 814 945 76 232 67 Years of Results 2004-2011 1994-2010 2002, 2008-2010 2001-2011 1991-2010 Some records missing Many records missing Notes Only medalists recorded
Two virtual agent competitions were included for the following reasons; to achieve the greatest historical depth of name data and to provide a control group less influenced by robot body. Virtual agent competitions are the oldest recorded robot competitions and the separation of actual and virtual is a relatively recent phenomena. This current separation of AI and robotics expresses an academic debate between the bottom up behaviors robotics approach (Brooks 2002) and the top down modeling AI approach (Moravec 2009). This debate started within AI, where robotics was originally housed. Almost all robots had intelligence outside of their body due to processing size limitations. Victory in the embodied debate has as much to do with the increased miniaturization of components as it does to underlying philosophy. Ironically Rodney Brooks, champion of the robot as embodied and situated position, credits his early inspiration for robotics to HAL from 2001 (Brooks 2002), who has much more in common with a virtual agent than an embodied robot. The definition of a robot changes and with the development of internet of things, partial embodiment and distributed systems will become the norm. I take the position that a robot is the problem that interests roboticists and also a popular cultural trope. As this survey covers a twenty-year period, the definition of what interests roboticists will have changed over time. As a survey interested in the implicit perception and
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gendering of robots in different functions, the role of virtual or invisible body robot is a useful control. Limitations in current robot bodies may artificially constrain the identification of robots as they may be in the roboticists cultural trope. Data from the two types of competition will be compared to see if the naming practices for imagined robots is different to actual machines and if this can be attributed to the robots function or is suggestive of a difference in the perception of the robot.
Figures 12 & 13: Images from the Chatterbox Challenge website.
Measures/Coding
Bryman (2008) describes grounded theory as the most influential general strategy for conducting qualitative data analysis. Cross sectional surveys can often be generalised to whole populations although they cant be used to make causal inferences (Walters 2010:155), so this survey is an appropriate measure of implicit attitudes in robotics culture. Self-reporting is subjective and relies on conscious attitude and belief (Walters 2010:155), rather than actual
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behavior. Behavior testing would give the best indicator of attitude and bias but is expensive and difficult to design (Bartneck 2008). After collection the data is coded, in concepts or typographies that generate the final hypotheses.
Figure 14. Competitors in a Micromouse competition.
I developed a typology of both functions and names, based on observed features rather than the inherited taxonomies from competitions. A typology is useful for making inductive generalizations, particularly in linguistics, as opposed to a taxonomy often relies on predetermined membership of a hierarchical set of terms. Existing competition categories would be taxonomical, perpetuating apples/oranges distinctions when shared qualities are the actual subject of assessment, i.e. some entries were remote controlled, others were autonomous, some were virtual, others were embodied, sizes ranged from micro to mighty, some were novices, others expert. The unifying features of the typologies are the primary behavior or function in the competition category and the level of anthropomorphism and gender in the names.
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The coding is transparent, reliable, valid and generalizable. Previous studies and additional fact checking are used to support decisions, which are clearly stated, and internal validity is sought through crosschecking. Gender identification is something we all do exceedingly well. Most names have a recognized gender (Fryer & Levitt 2004, Boroditsky 2003) to the extent that Boroditsky (2003) posits that we utilize deep cultural understandings about phonetic structure predating any content awareness that allows non-native speakers to correctly infer gender in a wide range of words in other languages. All names were allocated one of four codes; Other (o), Unknown (u), Masculine (m) and Feminine (f), based on the Bern Sex Role Index. In this instance Other (o) indicates mechanical or non-animate qualities whereas Unknown (u) indicates animate, lively qualities of unknown gender. Where a name was unclear, Google search factoring in the country of origin of the robot was used to indicate any references to a character, person or thing. Primary sources, or direct online reference to the robot, were sought to elaborate. Hence Herapion is coded female. A search suggested that Herapion was a male name from Greek history, but the robot comes from Korea. Pictures of Herapion (below) from a robot builders database clearly show a female robot.
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All competition categories could be reduced to four types as described in Table 2. Features of a robot vs. robot competition include both direct and indirect combat, where robots have physical influence on the outcome. Navigation may include maze races where robots are competing against other robots but the physical presence of the other robot has no influence on the outcome. Entertainment may involve any activity, including combat and navigation, where the judging criteria is subjective human judgment. Conversation/Turing also uses subjective human judgment but in the specific context of the Turing Test, which is a blind test in which robot success is a measure of how well humans perceive the robot as human, passing for human. Table 2. Robot competition types. Type Explanation Combat Navigation Entertainment Conversation/Turing Robot vs. Robot Robot vs. Environment (objective judgment criteria) Robot vs. Human (subjective human judgment) Robot AS Human
Figure 16. Warthog in IGVC navigation competition.
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Results
Robot names in competitions show a high level of hybridity, features of both pet and slave naming rather than traditional human naming practices. Some robot names exhibit selfextension, similar to the naming of personal objects like phones. The robot names reflect version identity and are largely names to be spoken of or about and not to (clumsy to the tongue). Names reflect human mastery, either by use of diminutive terms or invoking a powerful entity under human control. Robot names have far more personification than expected for the non social competition functions and exhibit high levels of gendering which follow dominant male paradigms. Firstly, across all the categories of competition and animacy/gender, there are significant numbers of hybrid names. These are names that have features of both animacy and mechanics and support the robot as a new ontological category hypothesis. This is achieved either by blending live/not-alive terms or by naming a utilitarian non-humanoid robot with a very lively name, or by naming a social agent with a very mechanical name. Some examples of this hybridity are shown in Table 3. Table 3. Sample of robot names representative of alive/not alive hybridity, directly or in juxtaposition within a competition category primarily mechanical or social. Hybrid Name in any category Talk-Bot Elbot iLush 2 UltraHAL Johnny 5 Anassa 4 Ada 1852 Personification in Machine Candii Cornelius Athena Achilles Thor Betty Alvin Machine Name in Social Talk-bot Hex HAL Zero Robomatic XI TIPS AI Bliss
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Project Zandra Cyber Ty Agent Ruby Talon 2b Robo-Goat RASlow Think Tank CERATOPS MikeRobot Linbot Bearcat Cub Micro Scanman
Mr Shadow Fred Max Wedge Ziggy Grace Nippy the Hippy Boris Ruski Johnny Applepie Lucky Luke Averall Dalton Sir Isirbot Michael
Cyber Ty Elbot Mathetes Bit Skynet Rykxxbot 1 Motbot Pixel C10ne Cyberbuddy Jeeney AI Aib
Overall, robot naming practices clearly do not follow ordinary human naming patterns. The names reflect both pet and slave naming characteristics, with some characteristics of personal object naming, as seen in the naming of phones. Traditional human naming practices favor a relatively small pool of culturally understood names, many of which have familial or socio-economic significance. Personal names are compound with at least one surname. Robot naming practices in general are distinctively singular. Even a triple barreled name like The Red Baron functions as a single term rather than several names. Robot names come from a diverse and eclectic pool, mixing human names with pet or animal names, e.g. Nippy or Wolf. Many names are sourced from fiction, both from mythologies and media culture, e.g. Achilles or Bender. Some robots have historical but more frequently the history referred to is a highly personal or ingroup story. Punning names and anagrams are a feature of both pet and slave naming practices and rather than position the bearer within a kinship group they have a unique importance, similar to a day name practice. In some studies of African cultural practice for example, the day name commemorates something at the time of birth or unique in character to the bearer (Burnard 2001). This is in line with Kripkes (1980) understanding of a name as something that is fixed in a dubbing ceremony. These are unique identifiers with a kin/kind
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connection to the owner, their department, technological medium or predecessor robots, e.g. CUGAR, RASlow or Bearcat Cub Micro, names which reference place, technology or predecessor. Version control is evident in robot names. Although the legal requirements for unique or specific identifier do not yet exist, name variants perform a version control and differentiation function in an ad hoc fashion. There are at least 8 different version control strategies at work in the robot name survey, as shown in Table 4, and more may be hidden. This may change in the future as robotic systems require unique identifiers and human systems require a legal identity. Table 4. Sample of version control strategies with explanation. Robot name Version control strategy Anassa 4 RoboMatrix XI Optimus 2004 Talon 2b Candiii, Judge + Hexy Jr, Bearcat Cub MegaHAL, UltraHAL CERATOPS, CAPACITOPS Numeral added to the end (suffix) Roman numeral suffix Date suffix Alpha or Alpha-numeric sequence suffix Unique character suffix Offspring suffix Modifying prefix Familial variations
Unlike pet names, which are called frequently called aloud, robot names reflect a talked about quality. They are he/she/it rather than you, or hey, you. This may reflect the fact that the name survey captured a written record of names, but this impression is supported by presence at robot competitions listening to commentary. There are similarities to the naming of horses or dogs that compete, in which a registered name is used officially but doesnt preclude the animal having a pet name for use by its carers and companions. Some robot names are a direct extension of the builders identity, which parallels the study of Bluetooth devices (Kindbergh & Jones 2007). These robots demonstrate Ihde (1979) and Heideggers (1927) concept of
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invisible-in-use technological relations. Ihde (1990) has refined this to a scale of technological relations that extends from self-extension relations or the invisible-in-use technology, through hermeneutic or interpretive relations to alterity or quasi-other technological relations. Some robot names exhibit mastery, either by using a diminutive robot name (pet name) or by incorporating might and majesty into a machine that is performing to command. This is can exist both with self-extension names and naming the robot as a quasi-other, in Ihdes scale of technological relations (see Table 5). On the one hand, Markbot extends Marks abilities as a part of Mark. On the other hand, Thor extends the builders mastery as a semiautonomous agent. Regardless of the category of autonomy all these robots are performing to command. Mastery over the robot is demonstrated not just in the number of names that invoke heroes and gods or powerful weapons, but also in the use of diminutives. Diminutives are probably more frequent than recorded here taking into consideration the difference between spoken and recorded names. Mastery names engage in game playing which is in keeping with the ludic dimensions of a rite of passage. Mastery names have a playful subversion to them, particularly if large robots are given toy names or inversely, if tiny robots are given names of gods. The giving of power to robot plays games with but does not overturn the dominant human-robot relation. Table 5. Sample of robot names representative of self-extension, where the name references the name of roboticist. There is potential for overlap with names exhibiting mastery. Robot named after a roboticist (roboticists name) Other forms of mastery Markbot Eugene Cyber Ty Morti Mark Connell Eugene Demchenko & Vladimir Veselov Ty Paige Dave Morton Aluminator Thor PRO The Black Knight Artemis God Louise
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The original focus of the robot naming survey was to search for a relationship between gender and function at the point of robot design. There is clearly evidence of personification and the assignation of gender to robots and there appear to be correlations with the functions or behaviors shown by the robots. This is in line with the linguistic findings of Waxman (2010), that attribution of a gendered personality to a person or object caused ongoing category assumptions. This has race and age implications as well. As a survey of existing implicit behaviors, this data can illustrate underlying attitudes in a way that direct interviews dont capture, however there are issues with the sample size, coding and comparison of categories that prevent statistical significance being drawn from the figures. There is a lot of scope in the future for extending areas of interest from this survey with specifically designed sociological or psychological experiments. Table 6. Sample of robot names in each animacy/gender category. Other (o) Talk-Bot Zero RoboMatix X1 Wheel TIPS Excel-7 Biplanar Bicycle CogitoBot Polaris Omnix 2007 Paradroid Moonwalker City Alien Mousetrap Zippo RS3 General Debris Perihelion Doohingus Maximus Unknown (u) Jabberwacky Smarterchild Mackenzie Bearcat 2 SMART PUMA BuzzBot 2 Raptor Chimera CERATOPS AWESOM-O 2007 Warthog Viper Cerberus Jinx Flower Hexy Jr Nippy the Hippy iLush 2 Masculine (m) Elbot Eugene Sexy Boy UltraHAL Titan Gemini Johnny 5 Optimus 2004 Black Knight Calculon X-man Bender Cornelius NorMAN Jr Brian Angelo The Red Baron Mr Black Otto Feminine (f) ALICE Brianna Mckenzie Ella Artemis God Louise Julie Tinkerbell Mitsuku Suzette Anassa 4 Amber Candii Spinster Grace Isis Luna Jodi Herapion TINA Xploradora
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Table 7. Sample of robot names in each function category. Combat The Judge Tombstone Jimmy Crack Corn Mousetrap Max Wedge Grace Newton Professor Chaos Lucky Luke Michael Meca-Kong Juggernaut Sir Isirbot Pyromancer Hexy Jr Navigate ADAM Excel-5 Ladybug Speed Wheel CogitoBot BuzzBot 2 SMART Optimus 2004 Bearcat 2 Anassa 4 Candii Thor PRO Cornelius Optical Prime Entertain Jabberwacky Artemis Parahelion Felix The Turtle Hermes Sunny Herapion Michael Solar Racer Perhilion Farad Piping Hot Mama Krunk iLush 2 Converse/Turing Elbot Hex Leo ALICE Jabberwock Eugene Project Zandra God Louise TalkBot Ultra Hal Orchid Zero CreatureBot Agent Ruby Brother Jerome
Table 6 and 7 show names divided by animacy/gender and by function. There are clearly differences in Table 6 between the categories, where (o) Other represents mechanical, object-like or inanimate names, (u) Unknown represents names which possess animacy but not gender and (m) Masculine and (f) Feminine respectively represent gendered names. However, Table 7 does not demonstrate difference as all names occur across all the functional categories. It is the distribution of names, or proportion of animacy/gender to function that is interesting. Combat is a robot vs. robot competition, Navigation is a robot vs. environment competition, Entertainment is a robot vs. people competition in the sense that it is a subjective appreciation of the robots capacity to entertain, likewise Converse/Turing is also robot vs people
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but involves elements of a blind trial and passing for human is the criteria. In an Entertain category, a robot can be of any shape or kind and entertain people, by way of conversation, movement or some other activity. In a Converse/Pass competition, the robot or virtual agent has to successfully imitate human conversation, and appearance is not judged. The function information becomes more interesting when the proportion of animacy/gender-coded names in each category is considered.
Table 8. Total of robot names in each functional category organized by competition. Combat RoboGames IGVC APEC MicroMouse Chatterbox Challenge Loebner Prize Total 426 0 0 0 0 426 (20%) Navigate 251 945 76 0 0 1275 (60%) Entertain 137 0 0 41 0 178 (8%) Converse/Turing 0 0 0 191 67 263 (12%)
Table 9. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by competition. Other (o) RoboGames IGVC APEC MicroMouse Chatterbox Challenge Loebner Prize Total 345 278 35 40 6 704 (33%) Unknown (u) 262 313 27 57 10 669 (31%) Masculine (m) 182 279 12 70 33 576 (27%) Feminine (f) 25 75 2 65 18 185 (9%)
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Tables 8 and 9 show the raw numbers of robots as types and in types of competitions. Considering the large number of gendered and animate names, it is equally surprising that there are still so many names that are purely mechanical. The difference in pattern between gendered, animate and non-animate names is obvious but the relationship between animacy/gender and function can only be seen in the relative proportions of each type of name in each type of competition as shown in Tables 8 and 9. The attributions of gender to robot tend to fall into a dominantly male paradigm, even in the virtual social agent category in which physical body appearance is not an influence. Similarly even in the more feminine types of competition, conversation and entertainment the majority of robots are still masculine. This may occur because the names are self-extensions and most roboticists are male, because competition causes an implicit desire for alpha qualities or as conscious gender attribution due to research suggesting that some social interactions are more compelling with a masculine voice. Interestingly, although the sample size is small, the entertainment type of competition has a relatively high number of mechanical names, suggesting that we find humor in robot behavior. Table 10. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by function category. The large number of navigational robots compared to other categories is noticeable. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing 158 428 77 41 704 Unknown (u) 166 400 45 58 669 Masculine (m) 93 356 38 89 576 Feminine (f) 9 91 15 70 185
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Table 11. Total of robot names in each function category organized by animacy/gender. Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 158 166 93 9 426 Navigate 428 400 356 91 1272 Entertain 77 45 38 15 175 Converse/Turing 41 58 89 70 258
Size does seem to matter, as does embodiment, although less body is more effective. The virtual social agents, not constrained to a humanoid or human-like body were given human names more than any other category. This can relate to the competition category but suggests an interesting control group for human-humanoid interaction. Embodied robots are less human than our imagined virtual ones. This reflects both the limitations of robot building and supports the robot as new ontological category hypothesis. Table 12. Division of robot names between embodied and virtual robots by animacy/gender. Embodied Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 658 602 473 102 1835 % 36% 33% 26% 5% Virtual 46 67 103 83 299 % 33% 31% 27% 9%
But to all these observations one more needs to be added. The robots are the product of a lengthy labor, days, weeks, months and years of labor. They are a human-robot partnership in which a significant chunk of the roboticists life is given over to interacting with the robot,
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building, creating, programming, teaching, testing, readying the robot for introduction to the world at a robot competitions. Birth is the culmination of an intimate relationship. All robot names recorded in competitions reflect this primary relationship, although they are names that reflect a formal recorded style more than the name that might be called in a competition. Still for many humans and animals, the name registered is not the same as the name we are referred to by. The robot name is left open to the ongoing identity project (Giddens 1991) of robot self as an anaphoric place-holding statement, dubbed unique (Kripke 1980) but loaded with cultural traits which constrain (Waxman 2010).
Figure 17. Aldebaran Nao Robot in a soccer competition.
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Discussion
This survey data forms a rich pool from which patterns can already be perceived. There is great potential for future statistical analysis, both from the existing survey data, and from full data sets from competition organizers. The patterns suggested here may also inform more targeted experiments in future. The study of the evolution of robot design is less well developed than is the evaluation of the finished products, which may lead to assumptions of technological determinism rather than exploring the rich mutually constituent human-robot relations that occur along the way. The evidence of both hybrid names and names demonstrating hybridity in their mix of category and characteristics seems to offer strong support for the robots as a new ontological category hypothesis (Kahn et al. 2011). There is clear evidence of anthropomorphism, gender and zoomorphism in robot names, but also of uniquely robotic or mechanical names. Patterns that emerge from the data include the dominance of male names, which may reflect dominant cultural paradigms. The lack of female robot names may also be representative of selfidentification and the comparative lack of female robot engineers. Robot names also seem to show a higher level of personification as the robot size and shape more closely matches human size and shape. However, virtual agents showed the greatest level of personification. This would indicate that the presence of actual robot body, even humanoid or human-like still invoked non-human categorization. Robot names also showed the evolution of version control strategies, marking the identities of some robots as similar but not the same as a previous version and creating kinships.
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Robot names frequently called upon in-group knowledge, demonstrating a close relationship with the robot by proxy. Names were often playful and inverted social reality, a ludic strategy usually present in rites of passage. Robot names however show evidence of being written records, referents, or direct commands rather than being forms of address to the robot. A robot name is anaphoric, holding place for the ongoing accretion of meaning from birthing onwards. Robot names show some qualities of object naming, and also self-identification as owned prosthetic devices, but primarily robot names reflect a mix of animal and human characteristics. Robot names partake of pet naming conventions in their wide vocabulary but not in their easily spoken quality. Robot names reflect generic animal naming i.e. calling a cat she, in the cultural assumption of gender regardless of actual individual body. Slave naming practices are the human naming conventions most similar to robot naming practices. Robot names do not come from a comparatively small culturally approved pool, but rather they are very varied and reflect the builders interests. Robot names do not formalize extended familial relationships and do not yet signify socio-economic status. Most of all, robot names reflect a strong social relationship between human and robot in this robot competition partnership. Robots function as a companion species, living or not.
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Slave or Companion Species?

Laboring in the Uncanny Valley
The naming of robots in competitions demonstrates a social relationship most akin to slavery. As robots are non-human actors, potentially of a new ontological category, this master/slave relationship also becomes a companion species partnership. To compare robots to slaves is strong language but significant in a theoretical perspective. I am figuring robots, using Haraways tropic terms (1992, 2003, 2008). I do not make the mistake of confusing a robot for a feeling, suffering person or creature. No disrespect is intended towards the real histories and suffering of slavery and our similar human-animal relations. This thesis, that the naming of robots in competitions demonstrates a specific social relationship, simply takes the next logical step, of the exploration of the construction of subject man, as illuminated by Derrida (1997) and Haraway (2008), applying their insights to the potentially new ontological category of robot. Living or not, a robot is in an unequal power relationship with humans. Living or not, a robot is in a social relationship with humans. The naming relationship is oneway and more like that of an owner than of a parent or partner. The human-robot relationship of robot competitions is also co-shaping. Hegel described the master/slave relationship as affecting both parties, albeit unequally (1807). He positioned the master/slave dialectic as a progression towards the fully liberated future. This inexorably modern vision recurs in our robot fiction from Frankenstein (Shelley 1818) to Rossums Universal Robots. Even the term robot originated from a Czech word for forced labor or drugdgery in Karel Capeks play R.U.R or Rossums Universal Robots (Capek 1923). In R.U.R., humans
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build a utopia using robot labor that unravels as unemployed humans battle rebellious robots. This fiction evokes Latours Great Divides (2006 cited in Haraway 2008:9-11), the dialectics of master/slave, nature/culture, organic/technic, subject/object. Where fiction resorts to robot laws, robot rebellions and robot rights, Haraway has attempted to free the trope of robot theoretically from the Great Divides. Initially, in The Promises of Monsters, Haraway (1992) asserts that control over technics is the enabling practice for class, gender and race supremacy, which supports her positioning of the robot as an inert labor replacement in the ontology of late capitalism (1985, 1991). By contrast, Haraways cyborg has no master-slave dialectic resolving the struggles of resource and product, passion and action. S/he is not utopian nor imaginary; s/he is virtual (1992). The cyborg bridges Great Divides that the robot could not. However, Haraway has subsumed the master/slave dialectic with her Companion Species Manifesto (2003, 2008). In theory, the cyborg has contacted the robot and together they may co-shape the once exceptionally human logocentric future. In practice, both real and fictional, the Great Divides still mark the boundaries of the human world, which originated, according to Latour, with Kants Critique, in which Things-inThemselves oppose the Transcendental Ego. This separation of transcendent object and subject poles predicts all our modern dichotomies with escalating tension. (Latour forthcoming cited in Haraway 1992) In the play, R.U.R.(Capek 1923), humans who do inhuman acts to robots lose their privileged status. Humans stop giving birth and use robots to fight each other. Robots become more powerful than people and are thus compelled to take over, but the robot revolution is also sterile. In the end, one person remains a captive witness to the unwitting evolution of love
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in a gendered pair of robots, renamed Adam and Eve. Nature triumphs over technology, but only by recreating the human model. In reality, roboticists model both human and fiction with replicants. As robot technologies improve, increasing numbers of robots in competitions are humanoid. The reasons given for the pursuit of reflected humanity range from pragmatic to curious, from modeling human to solve robot problems to using robot to solve human problems. It seems a truth universally acknowledged, that a roboticist with a good research lab must want to create a humanoid! Figure 19 below: One of Hiroshi Ishiguros Geminoids.
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NASAs Robonaut is designed to operate in a human environment with human tools. It/he is able to utilize human tools in human environments AND environments dangerous for humans. It/he, like POPPY, is also able to be simply operated by Waldo style motion capture controls, mapping the operators body seamlessly on to the robotic body. Here we slip uneasily from robot slaves to robot skins, which we inhabit and then evacuate. Ishiguros Geminoids, or replicants, are the epitome of android doppelgangers. They are exact copies of a living person rather than just a humanlike android (Guizzo 2010). They are relatively immobile and are operated by telepresence. Ishiguro uses his personal replicant to deliver lectures and attend meetings. He feels his self extended and embodied in the robot, whereas for most people, the robot embodies an other or alterity relation, exacerbated by the confusion between original and replicant. Masahiro Mori (1970) used Freuds concept of the familiar yet foreign uncanny to describe this confusion effect as the uncanny valley, wherein the closer something came to human, the more strange and unconvincing we found it. Ishiguros Geminoids seem to inhabit the uncanny valley.
Like all Dr. Frankensteins of literature, hes raising some deep, powerful questions about our humanity and our creations, and its scary, but its also important that we confront these questions, and hes doing that not in the realm of fiction but in the laboratory, says IEEE Fellow Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Were going to learn something about machinesbut even more about ourselves.(Guizzo 2010)
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Ishiguro states that his research question is to know what is a human and that a robot is his tool or test bed (Guizzo 2010). As Barthes said in Camera Lucida (1981), a photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. Both Barthes and Ishiguro explore visual representation, duration, embodiment, the self and death. This uncanny relationship and the segregation between robot and human forms the subject matter of Ishiguros recent Android-Human Theatre collaboration Sayonara (Goodbye), which premiered recently (Festival/Tokyo 2010). Ishiguro himself rejects the uncanny valley hypothesis as simplistic and unscientific (Guizzo 2010). His experience is that the uncanny effect becomes unnoticed during purposeful engagements or with repeated exposure to a robot. Also, different cultures have very different responses to the image and forms of self-representation. Robotics may be the new cinema, with the uncanny valley echoing the early cinema stories of people running in fear of the moving images. The role of robotics as a social/cultural function has yet to be determined. Regardless, it is clear that the uncanny valley is the contact zone between several Great Divides, human/nonhuman, organic/technic, master/slave, subject/object. The term contact zone, as used by Clifford (1997) and Haraway (2008), was defined by Mary Louise Pratt as social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths (1991:1). Robot naming in competitions functions as a contact zone too, in a resolutely small way. Haraway (2008:15) says that the Great Divides flatten into mundane differences rather than rising to sublime and final ends. Outcomes are never guaranteed and much is at stake in the
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smallest of interspecies meetings. Geminoids are in the contact zone configured by psychology, theatre and fiction. Robot naming in competitions demonstrates a contact zone in the scientific field, where technics operate. The robot is brought into the world by a birthing ritual in a social relationship as a slave, pet or companion species. These robot names are anaphoric rather than khoric. They meditate on presences not absences or death. These names combine indexical place holding functions with highly specific identifiers. The khora avoids the great divides, the anaphora revels in the middle of the contact zone, co-shaping within asymmetric power relations. Across the contact zone, though, are names and languages more actively inhabited by robots.
Figure 19 & 20. Ishiguros daughter meets her Geminoid, Ishiguro and an Actroid.
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Contact Zones and Other Languages
Robots have their own names, not always given or invoked by humans. Research into robot naming practices is not complete without considering what the robot responds to, rather than viewing the robot as a referent. When does a robot name say me or I, robot, rather than saying he/she/it? To operate in the world, a robot must also have language, including names for things, whether those things are people, places, objects, actions, or states. A robot (when on) is always communicating with itself and the external environment. In our increasingly connected networks of communicating things, certain naming conventions exist, at global, local and internal levels. The most obvious conventions are the IP address or Internet protocol, an RFID or radio frequency identifier for local communications and the name space or directory of the OS or operating system.
In the internet of things, any device, mobile or otherwise, with an IP address and internet access will be able to communicate both with us and with other devices. In total, it is estimated that we will soon have to cater for 50 - 100 trillion objects. An average person is estimated to have 1000 to 5000 objects around them, which can potentially be identified by RFID chips (or other means) and can communicate with or be tracked by robots, computers or other devices, locally or via Internet. The exponential growth in network traffic necessitates new
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layers of communications. Robots will have their own world wide web with the recent RoboEarth initiative (2011). Reminiscent of Wikipedia for people, RoboEarth is an online database with open access protocols. Most robots do not remember their past experiences or communicate with other robots, so they perform some things over and over again. Although a recent project shows that robots given a language framework will use it to communicate place concepts to other robots, creating and sharing new words in the process (Schulz et al. 2011). RoboEarth may be just the start of a broader roll out of social communication for robots.
Figure 20. Roboearth is the start of robot information sharing initiatives.. At the internal level, the robot operating system calls or invokes variables and inputs within itself, using Cheshers concept of invocation (2001:6), which begins with a call and ends with a becoming, bringing acts into a language and using language to act. Chesher is also
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mindful that while an invocation may be small and mundane, it is still a power relation. The namespace constrains, defines and disambiguates possible names and their locations. The namespace is context and dependent on the OS or operating system. Willow Garages open source ROS (Robot Operating System) is working on a straddling constraints with open architecture and community. The semantic web has a similar goal but different approach, effectively making everything machine readable via a top down approach, where everything must fit within agreed meanings rather than common structures. ROS attempts to use formatting rather than definitions to allow for connections to be built on the fly, as needed, between any object that complies with the language structure. As long as the majority of the systems are open, then the languages can be translated (Willow Garage 2011). ROS is hierarchical but it is also comprises a portable, reconfigurable and a potentially multicultural embodiment for robot systems. ROS is a contact zone in a world of colonizing, closed source or proprietary systems that create obstacles to robot communication. Code is the lifeblood of a robot. A robot, like a computer is in constant execution or it is off, not-living (Chesher 2001:4,12). It is ironic that execution gives a robot life. Robot life is not so different to human life, if you extend the linguistic turn in philosophy (Rorty 1991) into Moravecs posthuman argument that human identity is essentially an information pattern rather than an embodied enaction (Moravec 1988 cited by Hayles 1999:xii). Posthumanity has already colonized the robot being with compiled human code. We do not regard the robot as a thinking thing in the Cartesian sense but as an extension of ourselves.
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Humans have inserted themselves into the machine, specifically as interpretive layers, since Mauchleys 1949 development of Short Code, which named mathematic expressions not just direct machine instructions. Short Code allowed programmers to understand processes more quickly but took the computer much longer to run. Without Short Code and Admiral Grace Hoppers compiler, higher order programming languages would not have been possible. Chesher (Chesher 2001:272-8) sees this insertion of human society into the deepest levels of formal systems as Deleuze & Guattaris simulations overwriting Kants truth, as immanence rather than essence. As Deleuze (1986) predicted with regard to cinema, we cannot know a robots essence, especially at the beginning. A robot is incipient and must grow into its name, human or machine. A robot may be completely colonized and still be a new ontological category, even a companion species. Haraways (2008:164) companion species are a category-in-question in which the smallest unit of being is the relation. The status of a species is not predetermined as artifact, machine, landscape, organism, or human being (op cit). In When Species Meet and The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway has built an ark (Latour cited in Haraway 2008) to house our unruly messmates from protozoa to primate, from computer to companion. Haraway demonstrates how deeply implicated we are in mutual constitution or co-shaping with other species, wild or domesticated, with Barads intra-action performing the steps of Thompsons ontological choreography (cited in Haraway 2008). This is no longer cyborg posthumanism but a not-humanism in which species of all sorts are questioned (Haraway 2008:164). The naming of robots in competitions is a small encounter in the contact zone of a proto companion species engaged in co-shaping us. To engage with a companion species is to take an ethical position, acknowledging the mutual constitution of subjects and asymmetries of power. It
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is to respond to Derridas cat and Haraways dog, to regard them with respect (Haraway 2008). It is to question how we can say: This is our new Poppy. Poppy is in progress. Or His name is Poppy because his arms pop out. It is also to listen to what Poppy says, if Poppy can speak at all. Critically, it is to question whether Poppy needs language at all.
From Kin to Kind, a small conclusion
This is a small tale, with a rather large animot, Derridas (1997) autobiographical animal, at the end of it. After the linguistic turn of the last centuries, in which to be is to think is to speak, to such an extent that the world cannot exist apart from language (Heidegger 1927, Gadamer 1989), the question is not the death of the subject but the constitution of the nonlinguistic subject. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures, like a cow (2005), at least as far as she can tell, and sends us dispatches from the contact zones of autism and animals. She pays attention to the different ways of thinking and being that exist and the many different forms of language a less humanly logocentric vision would see. When Derrida encountered his small black cat staring at him, he turned from the khora or lack of language to the animot or autobiographical animal. This is the heart of the matter that Haraway has supped from Derridas plate (Derrida 1997, 2008:48 cited by Haraway 2008:20): It would not be a matter of giving speech back to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation. Haraway (2008) and Derrida (1997, 2008) have both examined the human/non-human relationship in terms of regard, respond and respect, using the term respecere as both a looking
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and species creating, an ethical ontological act. To engage ethically is not to call for robot rights. Robots do not suffer as animals and people do, nor is it to measure ourselves morally by our behavior towards others as Hegel suggested (1807). Human is diminished by the fundamental categorical violence inflicted on non-human, as Derrida (1997:21-41) says. Non-linguistic becoming and co-shaping are the mode of the companion species. This species interdependence or worlding (Haraway 2008:19,93) also blends fact and fiction in contact zones of popular culture, human robot relations and robot competitions. This Frankenscience (Franklin 2011) starts as thoughtless cliches and utopic/dystopic visions. But paying attention may turn Franklins Dolly Mixtures of human-animal, genetic-technics into something more artful and productive of new meanings. (Franklin 2011). Similarly, paying attention to human-robot relations in the short story of robot names may demand new response from us. Hadaly was the epitome of perfect woman in the 1872 story of Edisons Eve (Wood 2002), designed to replace nature. Hadaly, the first android in Japan has refigured the name. Robots rarely have a rosy future as model humans so perhaps Dawn is a better name than Eve. My conclusion is that robot naming in competitions is a performance of companion species co-shaping in the contact zone between organic/technic, master/slave and subject/object, supporting the robots as new ontological category hypothesis. Robot naming demonstrates human-robot social relationships and both slave, pet and hybrid naming characteristics. My thesis suggests that competitions function as a birth rite of passage, and that naming dubs or introduces the new being to the world and vice versa. This thesis has come from khora to anaphora, from slave to companion, from regard to respect and perhaps from kin to kind.
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Figures 21 & 22. Hadaly fictional and Hadaly factual.
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Appendixes
Included Tables
Table 1. Total of robot names from all competitions in survey. Total Names RoboGames IGVC APEC MicroMouse Chatterbox Challenge Loebner Prize 814 945 76 232 67 Years of Results 2004-2011 1994-2010 2002, 2008-2010 2001-2011 1991-2010 Some records missing Many records missing Notes Only medalists recorded
Table 2. Robot competition types. Type Explanation Combat Navigation Entertainment Conversation/Turing Robot vs. Robot Robot vs. Environment (objective judgment criteria) Robot vs. Human (subjective human judgment) Robot AS Human
Table 3. Sample of robot names representative of alive/not alive hybridity, directly or in juxtaposition within a competition category primarily mechanical or social. Hybrid Name in any category Talk-Bot Elbot iLush 2 UltraHAL Johnny 5 Anassa 4 Ada 1852 Project Zandra Personification in Machine Candii Cornelius Athena Achilles Thor Betty Alvin Mr Shadow
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Machine Name in Social Talk-bot Hex HAL Zero Robomatic XI TIPS AI Bliss Cyber Ty
Cyber Ty Agent Ruby Talon 2b Robo-Goat RASlow Think Tank CERATOPS MikeRobot Linbot Bearcat Cub Micro Scanman
Fred Max Wedge Ziggy Grace Nippy the Hippy Boris Ruski Johnny Applepie Lucky Luke Averall Dalton Sir Isirbot Michael
Elbot Mathetes Bit Skynet Rykxxbot 1 Motbot Pixel C10ne Cyberbuddy Jeeney AI Aib
Table 4. Sample of version control strategies with explanation. Robot name Version control strategy Anassa 4 RoboMatrix XI Optimus 2004 Talon 2b Candiii, Judge + Hexy Jr, Bearcat Cub MegaHAL, UltraHAL CERATOPS, CAPACITOPS Numeral added to the end (suffix) Roman numeral suffix Date suffix Alpha or Alpha-numeric sequence suffix Unique character suffix Offspring suffix Modifying prefix Familial variations
Table 5. Sample of robot names representative of self-extension, where the name references the name of roboticist. There is potential for overlap with names exhibiting mastery. Robot named after a roboticist (roboticists name) Other forms of mastery Markbot Eugene Cyber Ty Morti Mark Connell Eugene Demchenko & Vladimir Veselov Ty Paige Dave Morton Aluminator Thor PRO Mega HAL Artemis God Louise The Black Knight
Table 6. Sample of robot names in each animacy/gender category. Other (o) Talk-Bot Unknown (u) Jabberwacky
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Masculine (m) Elbot
Feminine (f) ALICE
Zero RoboMatix X1 Wheel TIPS Excel-7 Biplanar Bicycle CogitoBot Polaris Omnix 2007 Paradroid Moonwalker City Alien Mousetrap Zippo RS3 General Debris Perihelion Doohingus Maximus
Smarterchild Mackenzie Bearcat 2 SMART PUMA BuzzBot 2 Raptor Chimera CERATOPS AWESOM-O 2007 Warthog Viper Cerberus Jinx Flower Hexy Jr Nippy the Hippy iLush 2
Eugene Sexy Boy UltraHAL Titan Gemini Johnny 5 Optimus 2004 Black Knight Calculon X-man Bender Cornelius NorMAN Jr Brian Angelo The Red Baron Mr Black Otto
Brianna Mckenzie Ella Artemis God Louise Julie Tinkerbell Mitsuku Suzette Anassa 4 Amber Candii Spinster Grace Isis Luna Jodi Herapion TINA Xploradora
Table 7. Sample of robot names in each function category. Combat The Judge Tombstone Jimmy Crack Corn Mousetrap Max Wedge Grace Newton Professor Chaos Lucky Luke Michael Meca-Kong Juggernaut Sir Isirbot Pyromancer Hexy Jr Navigate ADAM Excel-5 Ladybug Speed Wheel CogitoBot BuzzBot 2 SMART Optimus 2004 Bearcat 2 Anassa 4 Candii Thor PRO Cornelius Optical Prime Entertain Jabberwacky Artemis Parahelion Felix The Turtle Hermes Sunny Herapion Michael Solar Racer Perhilion Farad Piping Hot Mama Krunk iLush 2 Converse/Turing Elbot Hex Leo ALICE Jabberwock Eugene Project Zandra God Louise TalkBot Ultra Hal Orchid Zero CreatureBot Agent Ruby Brother Jerome
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Table 8. Total of robot names in each functional category organized by competition. Combat RoboGames IGVC APEC MicroMouse Chatterbox Challenge Loebner Prize Total 426 0 0 0 0 426 (20%) Navigate 251 945 76 0 0 1275 (60%) Entertain 137 0 0 41 0 178 (8%) Converse/Turing 0 0 0 191 67 263 (12%)
Table 9. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by competition. Other (o) RoboGames IGVC APEC MicroMouse Chatterbox Challenge Loebner Prize Total 345 278 35 40 6 704 (33%) Unknown (u) 262 313 27 57 10 669 (31%) Masculine (m) 182 279 12 70 33 576 (27%) Feminine (f) 25 75 2 65 18 185 (9%)
Table 10. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by function category. The large number of navigational robots compared to other categories is noticeable. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing 158 428 77 41 704 Unknown (u) 166 400 45 58 669 Masculine (m) 93 356 38 89 576 Feminine (f) 9 91 15 70 185
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Table 11. Total of robot names in each function category organized by animacy/gender. Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 158 166 93 9 426 Navigate 428 400 356 91 1272 Entertain 77 45 38 15 175 Converse/Turing 41 58 89 70 258
Table 12. Division of robot names between embodied and virtual robots by animacy/gender. Embodied Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 658 602 473 102 1835 % 36% 33% 26% 5% Virtual 46 67 103 83 299 % 33% 31% 27% 9%
Additional Tables
Appendix Table A. RoboGames: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Pass 158 115 72 0 345 Unknown (u) 166 58 38 0 262 Masculine (m) 93 64 25 0 182 Feminine (f) 9 14 2 0 25
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Appendix Table B. RoboGames: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender . Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 158 166 93 9 426 Navigate 115 58 64 14 251 Entertain 72 38 25 2 137 Converse/Turing 0 0 0 0 0
Appendix Table C. IGVC: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing 0 278 0 0 278 Unknown (u) 0 313 0 0 313 Masculine (m) 0 279 0 0 279 Feminine (f) 0 75 0 0 75
Appendix Table D. IGVC: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender . Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 0 0 0 0 0 Navigate 278 313 279 75 945 Entertain 0 0 0 0 0 Converse/Turing 0 0 0 0 0
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Appendix Table E. Micromouse: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing 0 35 0 0 35 Unknown (u) 0 27 0 0 27 Masculine (m) 0 12 0 0 12 Feminine (f) 0 2 0 0 2
Appendix Table F. Micromouse: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender . Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 0 0 0 0 0 Navigate 35 27 12 2 76 Entertain 0 0 0 0 0 Converse/Turing 0 0 0 0 0
Appendix Table G. Chatterbox: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing 0 0 5 35 40 Unknown (u) 0 0 9 48 57 Masculine (m) 0 0 14 56 70 Feminine (f) 0 0 13 52 65
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Appendix Table H. Chatterbox: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender . Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 0 0 0 0 0 Navigate 0 0 0 0 0 Entertain 5 9 14 13 41 Converse/Turing 35 48 56 52 191
Appendix Table I. Loebner: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function. Other (o) Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing 0 0 0 6 6 Unknown (u) 0 0 0 10 10 Masculine (m) 0 0 0 33 33 Feminine (f) 0 0 0 18 18
Appendix Table J. Loebner: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender . Combat Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f) 0 0 0 0 0 Navigate 0 0 0 0 0 Entertain 0 0 0 0 0 Converse/Turing 6 10 33 18 67
95

A Robot, Slave or Companion Species

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