Mad About Science: Furby

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

To truly appreciate the absurdity of Furby, you have to fall into a certain age range. My generation, in particular, happened to be the biggest beneficiaries of the mysterious Furby, while our parents… well, not so much.

Anyone under the age of 20 or over the age of 60 is proba-bly asking: “What in the hell is a Furby?”

You’re about to find out.

Furby was a toy that was first released in 1998. Much like the Cabbage Patch Kids of 1982, Furby took America by storm for the holiday season leading to some incredibly bad behavior by parents in a mad rush to appease their children for just a few minutes of peace and quiet. If only they had known what they were getting themselves into.

Furby was a form of autom-aton — a non-living object that is capable of moving around and doing things on its own. This is much easier to wrap our heads around now than in 1998. We didn’t have Roombas and self-driving cars back then. We paid thousands of dollars for computers that had 32 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) in 1998.

Furby acted as a unique cultural touchstone, and was the first major step toward bringing things like Roombas, Teslas and Alexa into our homes. It made robots seem less like Terminators and more like Gizmo (sorry sub-20 crowd; I’m a dinosaur and I act like it).

How a Furby worked was somewhat mysterious. It could wink, blink, open and close its mouth, wiggle its ears, and move up and down. It was also capable of speaking and, if you put it in a group of other Furbies, they would all start communicating. A new Furby spoke mostly “Furbish,” which was an unusual collection of nonsensical syllables, but over time it would appear to pick up fragments of English speech and repeat them, much like a parrot.

Similar to many animals, you could also train your Furby. Petting your Furby would en-courage behavior, while throw-ing or yelling at your Furby would discourage behavior and cause it to make an irritating noise. Sometimes, the machine would be a little bit confused by these actions and would start laughing and dancing.

Perhaps the most interest-ing thing about the Furby, in retrospect, was that it managed to exhibit all of this surprisingly advanced, almost organic behav-ior on a chip with 80 kilobytes of read-only memory (ROM) and only 128 bytes of RAM. The most stripped-down version of the first generation iPhone, released just nine years later, had 4GB of read/write storage and 128 megabytes of RAM. That’s like comparing a bicycle and the Starship Enterprise.

Some of you are probably wondering how it works. It’s shockingly simple. A chip stores and controls the commands for the motors and the speaker. These commands were preset by the designers to emulate things like dancing, blinking or winking with the knowledge that humans would react to this thing that appears to be alive — particularly if the actions were somewhat randomized.

The ability for the automaton to “learn” English was actually an illusion. The Furby’s full vocabulary was programmed into it from the very start, but it used contex-tual clues to mimic the appear-ance of organic learning over time. Petting the Furby after it used a word in English would trigger it to use that word more frequently. The microphone inside of the Furby would pick up loud tones (intended to be from yelling, dogs barking, car horns and so on) to trigger a prompt that would make the Furby appear startled and avoid behavior that was associ-ated with the loud noise.

Finally, the Furby had an infrared sensor in its forehead that allowed it to invisibly communicate with other Furbies. This would trigger it to “accelerate” its learning or break into a spontaneous dance party. This is the same technology that your TV remote uses to communicate with your television, and it was also the same technology used to make remotes for the Nintendo Wii work. Our eyes can’t see the infrared spectrum, but specially designed sensors can — that way, it appears to be magic when these things work invisibly from across a room.

Illusion and human ignorance were the core facets of Furby’s appeal. The “toy” was intentionally designed with a touch of randomness to trick us into believing that it was alive, possessed or marching head-first into Westworld.

In the years after its zenith, Furby has picked up traction in the community of circuit benders, people who alter circuit boards with pliers, chisels or other tools to see what sort of new effects might spring up from the chaos. Furbies are plentiful for this cause, with more than 40 million Furbies having been sold between 1998 and 2001. Most of them ended up in landfills or the ocean, but there’s still a market out there for collectors who have placed an arbitrary and inflated value on their variants all these years later.

It’s curious to think that had it not been for that obnoxious and unnerving toy, you might never have known what it’s like to command an electronic plinth in your living room to deliver coffee to you on a whim.

ocean, but there’s still a market out there for collectors who have placed an arbitrary and inflated value on their variants all these years later. It’s curious to think that had it not been for that obnoxious and unnerving toy, you might never have known what it’s like to command an electronic plinth in your living room to deliver coffee to you on a whim.

Stay curious, 7B.