So 4-Year-Old Avatars Can Reason. What About 40-Year-Old Politicians?

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are developing a virtual world avatar that has the reasoning ability of a 4-year-old child. From what I've seen of the political season that's upon us, I've been hoping for more than that.

What kind of attributes can we expect from such an avatar? According to Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the project, that means the ability to possess memories, believe things, want things, and remember things. Hmm, maybe "4-year-old reasoning" is optimistic, at least in politics.

To test their theories, the reseachers created the following demo in Second Life:

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.

Selmer Bringsjord, along with Andrew Shilliday, Joshua Taylor, Dan Wener, Micah Clark, Ed Charpentier, and Alexander Bringsjord, explain the project in their paper Toward Logic-Based Cognitively Robust Synthetic Characters in Digital Environments, and in a video clip entitled False Belief in Second Life.

"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 says. "Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense." And, hopefully, politics too.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:49 PM  Permalink