[info] [tt] A paper from AGI-08: AI avatars in SL

[Hughes, James J.]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/rpi-bsl031008.php

Bringing Second Life to life: Researchers create character with
reasoning abilities of a child

Troy, N.Y. - Today's video games and online virtual worlds give users
the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and
seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your
height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just
a pretty face.

A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working
to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have
beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will
be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players,
with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world,
according to the team.

At a recent conference on artificial intelligence, the researchers
unveiled the "embodiment" of their success to date: "Eddie," a
4-year-old child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to
draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.

"Current avatars in massively multiplayer online worlds - such as Second
Life - are directly tethered to a user's keystrokes and only give the
illusion of mentality," said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's
Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. "Truly
convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories;
believe things, want things, remember things."

Such characters can only be engineered by coupling logic-based
artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques
with the processing power of a supercomputer, according to Bringsjord.

The principles and techniques that humans deploy in order to understand,
predict, and manipulate the behavior of other humans is collectively
referred to as a "theory of mind." Bringsjord's research group is now
starting to engineer part of that theory, which would allow artificial
agents to understand, predict, and manipulate the behavior of other
agents, in order to be genuine stand-ins for human beings or autonomous
intellects in their own right.

The logico-mathematical theory will include rigorous, declarative
definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind,
including lying, betrayal, and even evil, according to Bringsjord.

To test "Eddie's" reasoning powers, the group created a demo in Second
Life that subjected their theory to a false-belief test.

In a typical real-life version of this test, a child witnesses a series
of events in which Person A places an object (such as a teddy bear) in a
certain location (such as a cabinet). Person A then leaves the room, and
during his absence Person B moves the object to a new location (such as
the refrigerator). The child is then asked to predict where Person A
will look for the object when he gets back.

The right answer, of course, is the cabinet, but children age 4 and
under will generally say the refrigerator because they haven't yet
formed a theory of the mind of others.

The researchers recreated the same situation in Second Life, using an
automated theorem prover coupled with procedures for converting
conversational English in Second Life into formal logic, the native
language of the prover.

When the code is executed, the software simulates keystrokes in Second
Life. This enables control of "Eddie," who demonstrates an incorrect
prediction of where Person A will look for the teddy bear - a response
consistent with that of a 4-year old child. But, in an instant, Eddie's
mind can be improved, and if the test is run again, he makes the correct
prediction.

A video clip of the "False Belief in Second Life" demonstration is
available online at: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/research/rair/asc_rca.

"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," Bringsjord
said. "Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education
and homeland defense."

This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and the
team hopes to engineer 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. Such a system could
allow cognitively robust synthetic characters to interact directly with
human beings, according to Bringsjord.

The proposed research would require the use of two of Rensselaer's
state-of-the-art research facilities - the Computational Center for
Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) and the Experimental Media and
Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).

The most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world,
the CCNI is made up of massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers,
POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters,
providing more than 100 teraflops of computing power.


###
EMPAC, opening in October 2008, features unparalleled capabilities in
visualization, audification, immersive environments, sensor
applications, communication technology, and physical modeling.

Bringsjord is leading this project, with participation from Rensselaer
doctoral students Andrew Shilliday, Joshua Taylor, and Micah Clark, as
well as undergraduate researchers Ed Charpentier and Alexander
Bringsjord.

The team's initial research was recently presented at the Artificial
General Intelligence conference held at the University of Memphis
(http://www.agi-08.org).
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