Friday, September 14, 2007

Online worlds to be AI incubators

Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds.

Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners.


The term "incubator" has immediate biological connotations, so I find its casual association with online virtual worlds immediately appealing.

Meanwhile, Zeno's cartoon anthropomorphism further taunts the once-reliable partitions between "real" and "synthetic."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I work in evolutionary computation and have long thought that this is how it would work out. You can think of it as the reverse-Matrix. In the Matrix films the system is created to keep humans inside in order to use them as energy sources, but in the real world I think it's more likely that humans would create the Matrix to serve as an incubator for artificial life and artificial intelligence.

I actually might be working with a company producing an MMORPG implementing some of these ideas in the near future.

-Adam
http://www.greythumb.org/people/api

Anonymous said...

...and when the avatar sheep look up and at the MMORPG players, and grin just before they say, "hello, baahhhh," thus we will then see the new dawn of artificial intelligence...8^}