Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages
Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's
pages
Over time, the encyclopedia’s software robots can become
locked in combat, undoing each other’s edits and changing links, say
researchers
Ian Sample Science editor Thursday 23 February 2017 14.00 EST Last modified on Thursday 23 February 2017 14.01 EST
For many it is no more than the first port of call when a
niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries
from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable
death of Aeschylus.
But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world
of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the
online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years.
Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of
articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply “bots”, that are
built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic
housekeeping tasks.
In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in
isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with
unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another,
the more they became locked in combat, undoing each other’s edits and changing
the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or
other bot was taken out of action.
“The fights between bots can be far more persistent than
the ones we see between people,” said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at
the Oxford Internet Institute. “Humans usually cool down after a few days, but
the bots might continue for years.”
The findings emerged from a study that looked at
bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedia’s existence. The
researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the
editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when
bots undid other bots’ changes.
They did not expect to find much. The bots are simple
computer programs that are written to make the encyclopedia better. They are not
intended to work against each other. “We had very low expectations to see
anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring,” said
Yasseri. “The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big
surprise to us. They are good bots, they are based on good intentions, and they
are based on same open source technology.”
While some conflicts mirrored those found in society,
such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more
intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight
in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested
articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the
Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot
and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and
2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot,
with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbot’s changes. The
two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and
Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.
Another bot named after Tachikoma, the artificial
intelligence in the Japanese science fiction series Ghost in the Shell, had a
two year running battle with Russbot. The two undid more than a thousand edits
by the other on more than 3,000 articles ranging from Hillary Clinton’s 2008
presidential campaign to the demography of the UK.
The study found striking differences in the bot wars that
played out on the various language editions of Wikipedia. German editions had
the fewest bot fights, with bots undoing other’s edits on average only 24 times
in a decade. But the story was different on the Portuguese Wikipedia, where
bots undid the work of other bots on average 185 times in ten years. The
English version saw bots meddling with each other’s changes on average 105 times
a decade.
The findings show that even simple algorithms that are
let loose on the internet can interact in unpredictable ways. In many cases,
the bots came into conflict because they followed slightly different rules to
one another.
Yasseri believes the work serves as an early warning to
companies developing bots and more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
An AI that works well in the lab might behave unpredictably in the wild. “Take
self-driving cars. A very simple thing that’s often overlooked is that these
will be used in different cultures and environments,” said Yasseri. “An
automated car will behave differently on the German autobahn to how it will on
the roads in Italy. The regulations are different, the laws are different, and
the driving culture is very different,” he said.
As more decisions, options and services come to depend on
bots working properly together, harmonious cooperation will become increasingly
important. As the authors note in their latest study: “We know very little
about the life and evolution of our digital minions.”
Earlier this month, researchers at Google’s DeepMind set
AIs against one another to see if they would cooperate or fight. When the AIs
were released on an apple-collecting game, the scientists found that the AIs
cooperated while apples were plentiful, but as soon as supplies got short, they
turned nasty. It is not the first time that AIs have run into trouble. In 2011,
scientists in the US recorded a conversation between two chatbots. They
bickered from the start and ended up arguing about God.
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