[jwp]

It depends on what your definition of "bot" is. Are you talking about when the ESP game records a person's session, then plays those moves back to other players (and other recorded sessions)? If enough about the recorded play is logged, why should the person playing interactively care?

I always thought that's one reason his games are so clever. You get better data out this way, too. Seems perfectly legit to me.

[amichail]

Does it matter if the bot was constructed from prerecorded play or not? What if it was constructed from prerecorded play from multiple players? What if it combined prerecorded play with heuristics?

It's still misleading. The player is expecting to play with another human being live.

[jwp]

This begs the question, how do you define a bot? From my understanding of the talk, they replay one person's session and don't use composites. But, point taken.

[amichail]

For the ESP Game, it might be the case that they replay one person's session.

But for Phetch:

"Emulating Seekers in a convincing manner is more difficult. If a real player enters useless descriptions of the image, we do not want the emulated Seekers to find it. Although this is not a significant problem since most Describers enter accurate descriptions of images, we nevertheless address it to protect the illusion that a real game is being played. The solution to the problem relies on the fact that we are using images from the ESP Game database, so the keywords associated with the images in the search engine are already known. Therefore, we emulate Seekers by not guessing the right image until a certain number of the ESP keywords have been entered by the Describer."

http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2005/CMU-CS-05-193.pdf#page=56