This Is What You Call A Group Of Robots

Posted Jul 28, 2009 5:37 AM

Okay, BotJunkies: here are the results of our contest to decide what to call a group of robots. Each of our judges has their top ten picks, and it wasn't easy... Steve Rainwater and David Calkins have sent along explanations of why they chose the terms they did, and as you read through them, you'll understand just how much thought all the judges put into their decisions. Lem Fugitt's picks are right here, and you'll find Steve and David's picks after the jump, along with a few of my favorites and the overall second and first place winners.

Lem Fugitt, Editor of Robots Dreams:

I was extremely surprised and pleased with the large number of entries and the creativity. Readers obviously took the contest seriously and put some thought into their selections. The entries ranged from obvious to obscure to hilarious, which made the process of narrowing them down quite a challenge.

My top 11 (I hate arbitrary round numbers) are:

Battery, Quandary, Singularity, Sprocket, Gear, Waldo, Meme, Future, Foundation, Discovery, Matrix

Of those, my favorites are:

#3 Discovery\#2 Singularity\#1 Waldo

A waldo of robots, first submitted by StephenMS.

The rest of the results, after the jump.

Steve Rainwater, Editor of Robots.net:

This was a huge list of interesting candidates. To help narrow it down I started coming up with my own mental guidelines for excluding words. Perhaps I'll post to my blog with more details. I ended up with too many guidelines to mention here. To give an idea, though, I tried to avoided existing collective nouns such as pack, hive, swarm; I avoided words like uprising or slave that suggested robots had undesirable qualities such as violence or subservience. I ended up with about 30 words. I eventually managed to pare that down to 10 and sorted them into a Top 10 style list.

I have to mention two words that got honorable mention: Funcregation and Stobor. "Funcregation of robots" sounds like something Bender would say to describe robots attending the Church of Robotology. Stobor is Robert Heinlein's word for describing an abstract danger in a concrete way. Before sending cadets into solitary survival exercises, the commander would warn them to "watch out for the Stobor" without telling them what it was. The cadets, thinking Stobor were some sort of dangerous creatures, would be extra alert, resulting in fewer casualties on the training missions. And, if you hadn't noticed, Stobor is robots spelled backwards.

But on to the list. Here we go, starting with number 10:

10. Bottery - a good idea but it sounds more like slang for a robot factory, "hundreds of new robots roll off the assembly line at the bottery each day".

9. Clattering - not bad but sounds like a "smattering of robots" which suggests to me just a few bots. "Most of the robots are in the factory but there's a clattering of robots in the park".

8. Ruster - "Ruster of robots" has a nice ring but suggests a certain state of decay. Maybe this phrase should describe a robot graveyard.

7. Gestalt - Another near miss. I like this one a lot but it suggests (to me) a hive-mind of robots more than simply a group of robots.

6. Capek - This was the only homage to a famous person that sounded plausible for this sort of use. Something about it suggests that it might mean not a group of robots but the best of the best robots, perhaps along the same lines as apex. "This new X5Q unit is really the Capek of Robots!"

5. Mechanation - Another interesting one. Does it mean a "nation of mechanical beings" or is the group of robots the result of the roboticist's "mechanations"?

4. Cacophony - I find this one strangely appealing even though it suggests some very noisy robots. "He covered his ears as the Cacophony of robots passed him on the street".

3. Assemblage - I like this one a lot but since I suggested it myself over at robots.net when first describing the contest I thought it might be self-serving to promote it any higher in the list.

2. Rumble - to me, this suggests not noisy robots but a group of robots getting ready to do something interesting en masse - "Ok bots, let's rumble!".

1. Rossum - This one has everything, alliteration, historical credentials, and even a nice rhythmic sound that rolls off the tongue easily; "a rossum of robots". This is easily my favorite.\

A rossum of robots, first submitted by Caffination.\\David Calkins, President of the Robotics Society of America:

There were lots of homages - like a "Chapek" of robots or an "Asimov" of robots. While I like the sentiment, it just doesn't work.

While there is a listing in Wikipedia for a "Cog" of robots, there is no cite, and if you Google the quoted term, you only come up with 2700 hits (which is statistically zero) most of which are only back references to Wikipedia for the term. I can't find any record of it prior to last year, and we must remember, that because anyone can add to wikipedia, that doesn't make it official. So anyone who wants to jump up and down and demand the use of "Cog" needs to show me where the term came from, and on what authority (and yea, being president of the Robotics Society of America (among my many other robotic-related positions) does give me a sense of authority in this realm...)

My top ten finalists alphabetically, with my rationale:

Array - So obvious, and so meaningful. For the non-programmers, an "array" is an organized collection of data - could be numbers, variables, names, or anything.

Clamor - Totally describes the sound that a group of bots would make.

Clank - Very onomatopoeia. Much like Clamor, it describes the sound a group of robots would make.

Cluster - Just like swarm (below) it's an actual robotic term, and self-descriptive.

Concentration - The double entendre is awesome. Concentration means both "grouping" and "thinking".

Posse - Another double entendre, taking it's root from Asimov's "positronic [brain]" and an organized group.

Singularity - Much like Array and concentration, it's intrinsic to what a group of robots is and is composed of.

Sodality - I like the fact that this is a created word, and yet impies it's origins and meaning.

Swarm - The notion that robots would be like bees, with a collective mind. Certainly there's a whole discipline of robotics called "swarm", so it's got some legs.

Synapse - I really like this one. In the human brain, multiple neurons create a synapse, so it makes sense that multiple robots would too.

Narrowing it down into the top ten was hard enough. Narrowing it down to the top 3? Nearly impossible. But in the end, decisions must be made.

And finally, my top 3 in reverse order:

3rd - Concentration. It always makes me smile because of the double meaning, but it the end, just not good enough.

2nd - Array. It was very hard to not pick this one as number one. My right brain demands it be chosen as 1st place, but my left brain is beating up on my right

1st - "A Clank of Robots." It's just so right.

A clank of robots, first submitted by DENOMOLUS.

And as for me, well, like the other judges, I was impressed (and more than a bit overwhelmed) with the creativity that went into many of these ideas, starting off with the very first one, "bottery." Along with David Calkins, the programmer in me very much liked "array," especially Manuel's suggestion that the array be explicitly defined with the exact number of robots in the group. A very robot-y idea. Dave also had a very robot-y idea with a "collective noun" of robots, since that's what a robot would have entered in this contest. I really liked exoteric's "argument" of robots for the programming nature of the term and the mental picture that it conjures, but also because it has the same slightly abstract elegance as other collective nouns. And of course, I have to give a shout-out to ben for submitting "a Junkie of robots..." You don't win, but I appreciate the sentiment.

In the end, I did my best to put aside my personal biases (impossible, I know) and spent a bunch of time reading through your comments as well as the judge's choices to arrive at the top two, which are:

Second Place: A clank of robots.

A lot of you, along with the judges, seemed to like the idea of a sound related term, and "clank" fits the bill perfectly. It's a word that makes you immediately think of robots and generates an effective sensory impression, while remaining short and to the point. The reason that I didn't put it first, however, is that to me, it seems just a little bit restrictive. A clank of robots makes me think of a group of clanking robots, and while it's certainly appropriate for a generalized group of mechanical bots, if there's one thing a thousand BotJunkie posts has taught me, it's that what have to remain flexible and open minded when we decide that something is a robot. And that brings me to:

First Place: An assemblage of robots.

The word assemblage is, obviously, already an appropriate collective noun for a group of just about anything, which is one of the reasons I like it so much: with such a diversity of things that we choose to call robots, the collective noun needs to be inclusive. Assemblage can refer to the state of being assembled (something robots are by definition familiar with) as well as the act of assembling (also something robots are familiar with), and the term lends itself well to both heterogeneous and homogeneous groups as well as nested groups, as a single robot can itself be an assemblage of robots. Assemblage can also be defined as "a sculptural composition consisting of an arrangement of miscellaneous objects or found materials," which is a little homage to people who create artbots and robots out of scrap, and there's also the reference to assembly code. While not quite as specific as "array," I think assemblage still has a reasonably robot-y connotation to it, and what can I say, I just think "an assemblage of robots" sounds right.

For the record, Steve did mention "assemblage" in his post about the contest on Robots.net, but the term was first submitted here several days beforehand.

An assemblage of robots. Congratulations, Andrew!

For all the winners, we'll be in touch by email.

Many, many thanks to the sponsors of this contest, including Chop Shop and Trossen Robotics. Thanks also to the judges, and to all of you guys for making this such an awesome and successful contest. Your mission now is to start using these new collective noun(s) everywhere, all the time, to get them accepted into mainstream society... And if you have to put together an assemblage of robots of your own to make that happen, then by all means, do so.