AI researchers think 'Rascals' can pass Turing test

EE Times, Mar. 12, 2008

Bringing Second Life To Life: Researchers Create Character With Reasoning Abilities of a Child

PhysOrg.com, Mar. 10, 2008

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers unveiled "Eddie," a 4-year-old virtual child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.



"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," said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project.

"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.

See also: AI Meets the Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living in Virtual Worlds

Read Original Article>>

Virtual pets can learn just like babies

New Scientist news service, Mar. 28, 2008

Novamente has developed a demonstration of a synthetic character (a virtual pet) in a virtual world being controlled by an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) program, which will be released to inhabitants of virtual worlds like Second Life later this year.

Their work, along with similar programs from other researchers, was presented at the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence at the University of Memphis in Tennessee earlier this month.