RPI Creating AI in Second Life; Wants to Build Holodeck

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,  with support from IBM and other outside parties, are experimenting with  using avatars to test cognitive theory inside of Second Life. It's not about an NPC simply following a behavior script; instead RPI wants avatars that can "predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world [...] by coupling logic-based artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques with the processing power of a supercomputer." Even without AI, crude avatars can already be pretty good at manipulating people, and Gartner is looking ahead to the time when avatars are even more persuasive. RPI is starting small (literally), but looking ahead.

RPI is looking, initially, at a "theory of mind" for children, specifically with a false-belief test. In the real world, a child (age 4) would be shown a person placing a teddy bear in a cabinet. When the first person leaves, a second person would move the bear to another spot, like a refrigerator. When asked where the first person will look for the bear, they usually answer with the refrigerator due to a lack of understanding of other people.

In Second Life, an automated theorem prover and procedures for converting conversational English  into formal logic make up the brain of "Eddie," the four-year-old avatar. When posed the above problem, Eddie responded as the human child would.

“Our aim is not to construct a computational theory that explains and predicts actual human behavior, but rather to build artificial agents made more interesting and useful by their ability to ascribe mental states to other agents, reason about such states, and have — as avatars — states that are correlates to those experienced by humans,”  Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project, said in a statement. “Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense.”

Working as a partnership between RPI's Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), the team wants to find a way for humans to interact with avatars in the real world: "a version of the Star Trek holodeck — a virtual reality system used onboard the starships that allowed users to interact with the projected holograms of other individuals."

Consider all of my right buttons pushed.

[via RPI]

Comments

[Bill]

I worked as a Software Engineer in an AI Lab in the 80s and we worked on Natural Langauge Processing and Agent Modeling using Prolog which was big in those days. Good to see work is still being done on this. I programmed a talking Penguin in Second Life, uses the Eliza keyword response paradigm. There's an AI group in SL that made some interesting fish that exhibit AI or maybe more like Artificial Life (AL). SL is a great testbed for these kinds of projects.