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Artificial Intelligence and Second Life

Tue, 03/11/2008 - 08:43 — Brett Bixler

One of SLs shortcomings is the inability to easily create non-player characters (NPCs) for us real folk to interact with. NPCs are useful in situations where you need that human touch, but can't have a real person on the other end of the avatar - for whatever reason.

Rensselar Polytechnic Institute is working on this! See this interesting post for more information. This technology will allow educators using SL to create more realistic simulations and build educational interactions that add that important social interation element - even if it isn't real.

Comments

Fri, 03/14/2008 - 09:28 — bks12

fake intelligence and second life

I saw the RPI announcement last night, how they've modeled a 4 year old in Second Life. I used to do a lot of AI work, still follow what's happening in the commonsense reasoning research. So here I go...

<flame>
Ain't no way in hell they've been able to create a 4 year old mind in Second Life, Third World, or Fourth Meal. Toddlers know insane amounts of stuff, developing a theory of mind being just one part. I'm sure I could hack 2nd Life avatars to do their experiment without theorem provers. In fact, who in their right mind would use theorem provers in 2008 to model human intelligence...whole thing seems like a great press stunt, dount there's much to see.

Don't show me a video...tell me where I can interact with the avatar, put it through my own tests.
</flame>

I wouldn't normally gripe about 2nd Life stuff, but this one got my attention. 2nd Life is still a primitive environment...for academics to claim they can make it model toddler smarts...well, they're just straight up liars.

Wow do I need this term to end ;-)