Origin of the Name Brobot

My brother lives in Seattle. I live in Düsseldorf. That's 7998 kilometers or 4970 miles, far enough so that night overlaps only in winter. Keeping in touch requires extra motivation, something like...like, having the same parents? No, something less meaningful... like a witch's brew of competition, strategy, and entertainment. We used to play computer games together as kids, battling it out with my troops against his, or working together in weekend slumber parties in his room to defeat monsters in dungeons.

We chose a game to fit our lifestyles: his hectic lifestyle, dominated by performing reconstructive retina surgery and pondering the great philosophical dilemma of when a kid was too grown and too aware to be read the book Go The F**k to Sleep, and my hectic lifestyle, the result of deliberate overindulgence in intellectual challenge and adventure, studying full-time for a computer science degree in my then only fifth-best language, an activity that was both perpetrator and rehab for a condition known informally as post-4-year-world-travel dopamine withdrawal.

We picked a game that we could play given our constraints, and mobile it was. As is typical for mobile games, it evolved pretty quickly into 95% grind and 5% strategy. I have a limited tolerance for grind in all of its forms. I wanted us to be able to discuss strategy together. Playing the game, after all, was about the two of us connecting and spending time together. At the same time, it would be more fun if we didn't completely suck at the game. At this point I was in the second year of my degree, and the theoretical classes had graciously made space for a few practical classes focused on programming, dependency injection, and other goodies such as object calisthenics. I needed a personal project to practice what I was learning. I needed a sidekick to help me up the learning curve, an Igor to my Frankenstein, a Piglet for my Pooh, a Donkey to my Shrek, a Hobbes to my Calvin, a Bender for my Fry. I soon started calling my sidekick Brobot, and the name stuck.

The game didn't work on an emulator, so I ran it initially on an old phone connected to my computer by remote control software. As you can imagine, this setup was a real headache, but it did give me a crash course on the stochasticity inherent in process automation. There was an intellectual challenge just out of reach of my abilities, and I was hooked. My brother and I eventually gave up on the game, but Brobot hung on, motivated by universal interests shared by humans and robots alike, things such as state-based automation and the testing of stochastic processes. Everything seemed to move in unison and with purpose, until one day...

It was too sexy. It walked into the room with a neural mesh net skirt, and lots and lots of layers. I mean, baby got backpropagation. It had so many layers that you wondered if it was even comfortable doing a simple forward pass. I tried to talk with Brobot and explain that this ANN, as Brobot called its new obsession, is not as practical as Brobot's current friends. ANN won't help it complete its tasks, ANN might introduce more uncertainty to processes and Brobot has been working to reduce uncertainty. Brobot listened carefully, or ignored me intentionally while giving signals of listening (it's hard to tell with robots, sometimes they seem like black boxes inside). Brobot turned to me and said, in a voice that you would imagine coming from a retro-looking yet emotionally evolved and empathetic robot: "I think ANN can be a good friend, just give me some time".

To be continued...