How it all fits together
The maze, the sweets machine, the jar, the bowls and the craft cupboard: here you can see what they are, how they fit together and why they are there.
Why does Pyssly have robots?
The web is full of robots: programs that read web pages on their own. We want to learn how they work, and show you.
Polite robots that do what the sign says are welcome. The ones that ignore it end up in a maze, where they walk around instead of taking our pictures.
And we make a game of it: every robot we meet gets a card, and you can feed them and adopt them.
The sign
How it goes
- By the door of a website there is a note called robots.txt. It says which parts robots may not go into.
- A polite robot reads the note first.
- If it says it may not go in, it goes to the pages it may read instead.
- Another robot ignores the note and walks straight in through the door.
The robot maze
How it goes
- Behind the door we have built the robot maze. The note says robots may not go in there.
- A robot that did not care about the note steps into the first room.
- Every room has doors to new rooms, and they lead to even more. The maze never ends.
- While the robot walks around in there, it is not with our pictures. And we see how it behaves.
The sweets machine
How it goes
- Here and there inside the maze stands a sweets machine.
- The robot walks up and asks for sweets.
- Sometimes the machine answers “I'm a teapot!” and sometimes “Pay first!”. The web has numbers of its own for those answers: 418 and 402.
- But there are never any sweets. The machine only shows the way even deeper in.
The robot jar
How it goes
- The jar shows the robots that are in the maze right now.
- Each robot is a little paper doll in the jar.
- The deeper into the maze a robot has gone, the further down the jar it ends up.
- When a robot has left, it disappears from the jar.
The bowls
How it goes
- You choose a robot with a name and put a nut in its bowl.
- The bowl is a little file on our website, which robots can fetch.
- If the robot itself comes first, it eats everything in the bowl.
- If another robot comes first, it has stolen the food. Then it ends up among the worst thieves.
The craft cupboard
How it goes
- Every robot we have met, in the maze or on the rest of Pyssly, gets a card in the craft cupboard.
- The cards are sorted into boxes by robot kind. Each card tells you what its robot has done.
- Every day a robot of the day is chosen, and the leaderboard shows which ones have done the most.
- With an account you can adopt up to three robots, name them and dress them with cogs.
What different kinds of robots do on the web is shown in How the robots work.