Are Robot Pranks Annoying? Absolutely!

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mechanical turk

Feedback can be quite cynical, so when faced with enforced entertainment, we tend to shy away. This might explain why purchasing ice cream in Türkiye can be a bit of a challenge. To buy ice cream, you must either truly enjoy it or tolerate an extended prank.

The Turkish ice cream shops are notorious for amusing their customers, often pulling tricks such as presenting cones filled with ice cream only to customers. They use sleight of hand to pull it away cleverly. These performances are astonishing and require years of practice. If feedback says we want ice cream, we’re really just after ice cream, not an immersive magic act.

When reporter Matthew Sparks tipped us off about a new preliminary paper on arXiv, we internally sighed. A robot that mimics the antics of a Turkish ice cream vendor caught our attention, as Matt noted, “all the essential research has been completed.”

The result is a robotic arm capable of twisting, turning, and swinging in various directions. Researchers programmed it to perform five entertaining tricks typical of Turkish ice cream vendors.

In one instance, the robot “bounces” the cone from side to side, giving the impression that it’s moving away from the user. In another scenario, it “evades” the user’s hand as they reach for the cone, creating a large arc before pulling back. And then there’s the “dance,” where it playfully levitates the cone in a circular motion just out of the user’s grasp.

Next, the robot was trialed on real individuals. This trick was rated as “more deceptive” compared to a control condition where the robot merely handed out ice cream without any theatrics. Notably, this approach “enhanced enjoyment-related responses (pleasure, engagement, challenge) and the robot’s perceived efficacy, while also potentially undermining performance reliability, perceived safety, and self-efficacy.”

In effect, “playful deception introduces a structural trade-off: it can delight and retain attention but often at the cost of predictability and trust.” The authors advise that “in safety-sensitive contexts, the resulting decline in trust and security may be intolerable.” Really? You think?

appropriate acronyms

When Feedback first solicited suggestions for the best and worst scientific acronyms, we had no inkling of the flood of responses to come. Our inboxes were overwhelmed with convoluted phrases reduced to mere strings of capital letters.

For instance, Stuart McGlashan shared information about a conservation initiative focused on “revitalizing the marine and coastal environment of the River Solway,” located at the border of England and Scotland. It was aptly named the “Solway Coast Marine Project” or SCAMP.

Stuart felt the project’s creators were shortchanging themselves. Given its focus on “marine life restoration,” wouldn’t it have been beneficial to include one more word to enhance the acronym? I concur with the feedback. The acronym should definitely reflect the Solway Coast Marine Conservation Initiative.

On the other side of the globe, Jamie Pittock and Jenny Marella from the Australian National University recently secured funding for a project examining the management of rivers flowing into the Indian Ocean. Creatively, they titled it “Management of Rivers Discharging to the Marine Domain (MORDOR).”

However, this serves as a cautionary lesson. Jamie recounted: “We posted a call for a Research Fellow, and Mr. Bilbo Baggins from the Shire applied. Thankfully, there were far more qualified candidates, and he was not selected.”

shakespeare shakes up

Feedback previously pointed out that two of William Shakespeare’s sonnets needed revisions to omit erroneous references to roses possessing thorns. Those sharp projections are more accurately termed spikes. Reader James Fradgley noted in a letter that Shakespeare’s scientific inaccuracies extend far beyond botany into astronomy.

In Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1, the titular dictator proclaims: “I am as unchangeable as the North Star / whose true nature of correction and rest / has no companion in the heavens.” Caesar is referring to the North Star, which is positioned so close to the celestial north pole that, while other stars orbit around it throughout the year, the north pole remains relatively stable in the sky.

However, as James points out, at the time of Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, “Polaris was not the North Star.” Instead, a star named Kotyab, or Beta Ursa Majoris, was nearest to the celestial north pole, yet it wasn’t sufficiently close to serve as a reliable navigation point.

“To complicate matters, Polaris is a Cepheid variable star,” James adds. This indicates that its brightness fluctuates regularly and it doesn’t shine with a stable intensity. “Honestly, I don’t understand why anyone bothers with Shakespeare,” James concludes.

Feedback tends to be more lenient. Our grasp of astronomical history isn’t solid enough to assert whether it was known in Europe that the North Star was shifting during Shakespeare’s era, but we believe he was busy enough that it makes sense he might have overlooked it. Cepheid variable stars, conversely, weren’t identified until 168 years posthumously, which seems like a valid excuse.

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