Excitement overtook Soda Hall this weekend when the Team for Practical Artificial Intelligence Systems announced that they were ready for the beta-testing stages of their new Robotic Female College-Student Emulator, or R.F.C.S.E. The team has been working diligently for over a year, and claim that their new model will revolutionize the social experiences of countless Engineering students by allowing them to speak to a girl for the first time.
The system is a fully functional robot built to appear exactly like a female freshman undergraduate from Southern California, except that it is specifically designed to target Engineering Students for social interaction. Programmed with a state of the art learning algorithm, the built-in computer is designed to recognize and respond to behavioral features the team has identified as being characteristic of undergraduates in the Engineering and Computer Science departments. The team demonstrated some of these amazing features in 301 Soda when the robot successfully identified a sweaty, terrified male as the object of its affection.
In addition to these basic behavioral diagnostics, the Robotic Female College-Student Emulator has several features never before seen in an automaton of this type. R.F.C.S.E’s Conversation Cessation Detectors (CCDs) allow the system to completely take over the conversation if necessary, utilizing a storage-bank of commonly used phrases. Programmed statements include: “Ugh, I have to read like 30 pages!” “This party’s really lame, we should go somewhere else.” “Do you think they have any more Jungle Juice?” “Is Late-night still open?” and “I’m a Psychology Major!”
J.C. Scheem, one of the R.F.C.S.E.’s chief designers, took questions after the demonstration. When asked whether he thought engineering students would be able to tell the robots weren’t actually human females, Scheem responded: “No, I don’t even think it’s a possibility.”