The Cube

It's also a computer program for recording short, mildly amusing things that people say on zephyr, the CMU computer science department's electronic chat facility. Every time something is recorded, the program also responds with a previously recorded blurb. Most of this page concerns the gory details about how the program is actually used. Unless you're a member of the CMU computer science department, you will not care about these details. There are some other cube-related Web pages you potentially might want to peek at regardless, though:

• The Cube Hall O' Fame, where particularly appropriate and/or amusing responses are recorded.
• Personal Selections from the Hall O' Fame.
• Transparent GIFs containing random previously recorded blurbs. Handy for including random silliness in Web pages. (A new random blurb will appear every time this image is re-loaded.)
• The Cube Web Counter. Can be used to generate GIFs containing random previously recorded blurbs and/or Web page access counts along with anything other text you might want.

Warning: the recorded material is occasionally R-rated, and often too technical to be understood and/or amusing to anyone other than serious computer geeks (and even then it's not always funny).

1. Witty
2. Bizarre / Surreal
3. Short (one-liners are best)

1. Since the Cube is supposed to be amusingly surreal, it's best to avoid including too much context. For example, it's best not to include attributions in the text of cubisms.
2. Dead baby jokes. But then that goes without saying. Almost. Actually, almost any joke of the form "Question? Answer" goes against the spirit of the Cube, since such jokes are overly self-contained.
3. Non-English text. Many people will disagree with this guideline, but there are several reasons I personally advocate it:
   1. There's a good chance that the Cube will eventually use some reasonably complicated word-matching heuristics. These heuristics may involve looking things up in electronic dictionaries. English ones. In which case your non-English submission will probably never, ever show up again as a response. Bummer, eh?
   2. If 90% of the people reading zephyr can't even come close to parsing your cubism, that's a guaranteed 90% chuckle-free return on the Cube's investment.
   3. I do occasionally edit the Cube's database to remove things which I find unfunny. If I don't understand it, well...

1. The Cube is hosed. It happens. Often.
2. You're sending it unauthenticated zephyrgrams. In order to prevent certain forms of cube abuse and decrease the likelihood of unpleasant bot-generated infinite zephyr loops, the Cube has been programmed not to respond to unauthenticated zephyrgrams, except perhaps for a bitchy warning that you're not authenticated.
3. The cube really is ignoring you, because someone told it to.

1. Send a zephyrgram to the cube.slurp instance containing a subset of the words used in the original zephyrgram. If no other recently seen zephyrgrams contain all the words in the zephyrgram you send to cube.slurp, the Cube will slurp in the original zephyrgram and treat it as if it had been sent to the cube instance. You will be noted as the cubism's "submitter," while the original zephyrgram's sender will be noted as the "author," a.k.a. "slurpee."
2. Submit it to the Cube on the cube instance as usual. As long as the set of words you use in your submission is a subset of the words used in the original zephyrgram, the Cube will notice that you're handing it someone else's weirdness, and will attribute it accordingly.

You can also send a personal message to zbot on the anon.<blah blah> or anon-<blah blah> instance, and the message will be forwarded to the <blah blah> instance, but as the "anonymoose" rather than as the Cube.

In order to distinguish between multiple anonymeese, you may also add a (non-negative) integer after the anon in the instance name; this integer will then show up at the end of the anonymoose's userid in the resulting anonymized message.

Another edit interface is now available, also from the cube.edit instance. If your zephyrgram contains "match: .... replacement: ...." , the stuff after match will be used to determine what cubism gets edited, and the stuff after replacement will be what the cubism gets replaced with, verbatim. The stuff after match should be a bunch of words, each of which must be in the cubism you want to edit.

Of course, then the inevitable occured: the Cube Web Counter. This monstrosity gives you the capability of including a page hit count and any other text you want, along with cubisms if you like, all in one GIF. If you fill out the Cube Counter Configuration Form Cube Counter Configuration Form, you'll get back a bug-ugly IMG link that you can cut and paste into your HTML files. Poof! You've got a counter that's not only functional but cubey!. Unfortunately, speedwise, we're talking galloping tortoise at best here.

There's a Cube Hall O' Fame containing any particularly funny submission/response exchanges that people might have deemed worthy of saving.

"It's a simulation of a toy from a Robert Silverberg novel (Tower of Glass). The story itself is about a revolt by genetically manufactured androids (a little like Blade Runner, I suppose, but a very different plot). The cube itself is a little toy that people put on the coffee table, or whatever. It listens to conversations going on around it, and responds to things by doing some sort of fuzzy match on things it is hearing on other parts of the network."

Greg's implementation was performing such a fuzzy match that it was in fact, for most practical purposes, completely random. Nevertheless, those of us CMU SCS students with sufficiently disturbed minds found it amusing. After Greg left CMU, the Cube was resurrected from scratch and peppered with additional goofy features. The Cube retains its original name primarily so that people who were annoyed by its first incarnation may merrily continue to ignore it without having to change their zephyr filters (too much).