User:Sensebased/sandbox

Bot Colony
The game's developer has written a novel of the same name, published in December 2010.

On January 29, 2015 the developer announced the game would be cancelled on March 15, 2015[1] due to poor sales. After fans expressed disappointment and showed their support through purchases of eBooks and Steam keys [http://steamcommunity.com/app/263040/discussions/ ] North Side decided to keep the game alive. Valve restored the Buy button on September 14, 2015[ http://steamcommunity.com/games/263040/announcements/detail/105062527391630376 ] and Bot Colony is again available for purchase.

North Side
North Side [www.northsideinc.com] is a Montreal-based company developing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) (together, dialogue) software since 2001. The company was founded by Eugene Joseph in 2000, after his first company, Virtual Prototypes Inc., went public on TSX in July 1999, and currently operates as Presagis [www.presagis.com]. In the early 2000, North Side did R&D work funded in part by the Department of National Defence, Canada, by the National Research Council, and Telefilm Canada [government contracts identified at end of. In 2007, North Side embarked on the development of Bot Colony [ http://store.steampowered.com/app/263040/], the first video game making coherent English dialogue with the characters an integral part of gameplay. The game development was financed in part by the Canadian Media Fund. The first two episodes of Bot Colony were launched on Steam on June 17, 2014. According to [ http://www.northsideinc.com/botcolony.html] the work on Bot Colony started in 2007 (preliminary work on parsing, ontologies, reasoning started much earlier in 2001). At the peak in 2014, the team has 45 members. The company spent a cumulative $23M on the project, of which $20M went towards R&D in Natural Language Understanding. North Side improved the NLU pipeline of Bot Colony, by adding a reasoner able to reason on English axioms (the equivalent of Prolog in English), and formalized procedural knowledge expressed in English. The new product, launched as VerbalAccess at Finovate in NYC on September 16, 2015,  is an English interface to financial services, enabling both transactions and interactive FAQ in English.

Technology
The Natural Language Understanding technology used in the game circa 2014 is introduced in this article containing a video of a conversation with a robot character, as well as a diagram of the client-server architecture. The technology was initially designed to enable a concept called text-to-animation, which means animating characters using English text. In Bot Colony, the player commands are serviced by the text-to-animation layer to get robots to move and manipulate objects. Player utterances result into the robot having quasi-emotions [described in the Bot Colony book] which are represented through non-verbal cues (facial animation, waving, nodding). Characters are able to understand references to a 3D spatial database (for example, the objects in the Intruder house). Furthemore, characters remember notable events, which are beginning to see or speak to a human, and the end of such events. They remember the time, date, of a notable events, as well as distance and angle to a human character, and what was said. This supports investigation in English, in the Robot Visual Memories section of the game, where players are able to access video footage taken by the robot, by zeroing in on the relevant event through their investigation.