Los Angeles, CA – An independent experiment was conducted yesterday in which a computerized robot was linked directly to the internet. The robot, which its creators refer to under the moniker “Cybercheese” because of its affinity for virtual swiss and munster, has been the long-time brain trust of a team of engineers at Craniatech Labs, located in Silicon Valley.
Farhan Rhesus, who heads up the team, said of the project, “It’s rather exciting because none of us knew what to expect. This kind of experiment has never been tried before.”
The origin of Cybercheese dates back to the early eighties, when the Federal Government began auctioning off tremendous amounts of post-cold war tank metal, defunct electronic components and moldy cheese. As a result of a brazen large scale acquisition of all three commodities, which many at the time called ill-advised and downright foolish, the project was spawned by four college students. Rhesus, along with three University of California at Berkeley classmates, envisioned a machine that would not only be technologically nimble but mechanically sturdy. During the initial stages of production, the group called their creation Dennis, until the robot’s insatiable hunger for simulated cheese manifested itself in May of 1995.
“It was a startling revelation,” said Hans Gretel, who takes credit for recognizing the quirk. “We always had difficulty eating cheese around him because he’d often try to snatch it—in fact, all of us nearly had our hands crushed to smithereens at one time or another—finally I realized, wait a minute, what we need to do is give him access to this stuff in a medium he can deal with safely.”
And that is exactly what they did. According to observations taken by Rhesus and his colleagues, once the high speed internet connection had been established, Cybercheese moved rapidly from one cheese-related uniform resource locator, or URL, to another, downloading vigorously. Less than ten minutes into the trial, however, he became ensnared in a network of pornographic sites from which he could not escape. Shortly thereafter, in fact within a matter of nanoseconds, the robot reacted in a way that Rhesus could best describe as nausea. “Cybercheese began to slow dramatically in his rate of calculation, overheat, and emit a gooey substance from his floppy drive which we have not yet classified,” he said.
The team, which is
not discouraged by the results, has committed to fine-tune Cybercheese
for future trials. Indeed, many in the scientific community
find the most remarkable aspect of the project to be the generation
of an artificial craving for an abstract item—in this case electronically
rendered cheese, which has been proven to have no nutritional value
to robots.