Researchers At Work On Avatar Cognition With 'Eddie'
A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with support from IBM and other sponsors, claim they're working on developing virtual world characters that can hold beliefs and reason about the beliefs of others. They say these characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of real-world people, and unveiled a 4-year old Second Life child named Eddie as an example.
The researchers' objective is to develop engineering to mimic the "theory of mind," or the principles and techniques humans use to interact behaviorally with other humans. The result, they say, 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 researchers say that Eddie's already been subjected to a "false belief" test, which they explain:
"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."
Apparently, using code they developed for Eddie in Second Life, Eddie made the "correct" prediction -- in other words, the one the human child would have made -- and further, showed he could be corrected, upon having his mind "improved." The research team has provided video of Eddie's test at http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/research/rair/asc_rca.
The research group says it wants to develop a real-world version of Star Trek's holodeck, where users can interact with projected holograms of other individuals (I wonder, is there anyone reading this site who requires explanation on what 'Star Trek's holodeck' is?) Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project, says that a system like this could allow "cognitively robust" avatars to interact directly with human beings.
Says Bringsjord, "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. Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense."
