coolness factor

[Kris Verdeyen]

The "Coolness factor" or CF ratio, as it's known in the industry, was first discovered in 1986 by Ivanov Coolness of the Moscow Institute for the Study of Engineering and Robotics. Coolness noted that some of the robots he and his colleagues built were beter recieved than others. Due to the bread shortage, and a lack of proper funding to actually build robots, Coolness decided to concentrate on this rather mundane research exercise instead of building a "Capitalist Killer" robot, which was, strictly speaking, his charge.

Coolness determined that, for any given robot, some people, opon seeing this robot, would exclaim "Whoa!", or in Russian "Whoalev!", and some others would say "ehh." (which is the same in both languages). Some others would have neither of these reactions. All that Coolness did was take the ratio of the "Whoa"'s to "ehh"s, and he arrived at the CF ratio:

CF = (# of Whoas)/(# of Ehhs)

Of course, a robot's absolute CF ratio is impossible to determine, because it would require showing everyone on Earth the robot, but a good estimate can be made by letting 10-20 volunteers see the machine in action.