Running bots as participants

Dallinger supports running simulated experiments using bots that participate in the experiment automatically.

Note

Not all experiments will have bots available. The Bartlett (1932), stories demo does have bots available.

Running an experiment locally with bots

To run the experiment in debug mode using bots, use the –bot flag:

$ dallinger debug --bot

This overrides the recruiter configuration key to use the BotRecruiter. Instead of printing the URL for a participant or recruiting participants using Mechanical Turk, the bot recruiter will start running bots.

You may also set the configuration value recruiter='bots' in local or global configurations, as an environment variable or as a keyword argument to run().

Note

Bots are run by worker processes. If the experiment recruits many bots at the same time, you may need to increase the num_dynos_worker config setting to run additional worker processes. Each worker process can run up to 20 bots (though if the bots are implemented using selenium to run a real browser, you’ll probably hit resource limits before that).

Running an experiment with a mix of bots and real participants

It’s also possible to run an experiment that mixes bot participants with real participants. To do this, edit the experiment’s config.txt to specify recruiter configuration like this:

recruiter = multi
recruiters = bots: 2, cli: 1

The recruiters config setting is a specification of how many participants to recruit from which recruiters in what order. This example says to use the bot recruiter the first 2 times that the experiment requests a participant to be recruited, followed by the CLI recruiter the third time. (The CLI recruiter writes the participant’s URL to the log, which triggers opening it in your browser if you are running in debug mode.)

To start the experiment with this configuration, run:

$ dallinger debug

Running a single bot

If you want to run a single bot as part of an ongoing experiment, you can use the bot command. This is useful for testing a single bot’s behavior as part of a longer-running experiment, and allows easy access to the Python pdb debugger.