Pattie Maes
Abstract
The relatively new field of artificial life attempts to study and understand biological life by synthesizing artificial life forms. To paraphrase Chris Langton, the founder of the field, the goal of artificial life is to “model life as it could be so as to understand life as we know it.” Artificial life is a very broad discipline which spans such diverse topics as artificial evolution, artificial ecosystems, artificial morphogenesis, molecular evolution, and many more. Langton offers a nice overview of the different research questions studied by the discipline [6]. Artificial life shares with artificial intelligence (AI) its interest in synthesizing adaptive autonomous agents. Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex, dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed.
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Digital Library
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Index Terms
- Artificial life meets entertainment: lifelike autonomous agents
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Reviews
Maria Theodoridou
Maes covers the topic of artificial life in the field of entertainment. Artificial life and autonomous agents are presented briefly in the introduction, and Maes explains why the application area of entertainment is regarded as important. Half of the paper surveys current agent research for animated movies and real-time animation systems. Common features of agents active in these systems are identified. Maes presents the standard research issues as well as more novel questions to be addressed. The paper's second half presents a detailed description of the ALIVE project, which aims at building entertainment agents. The virtual worlds of ALIVE and the agents that inhabit them are described. Maes makes important observations of users' interactions with the system: the importance of intuitive user gestures; the need for an artificial guide; user tolerance during lags and occasional missed recognition when animal-like or humanlike agents are involved; and the importance of user visualization of the motivational and emotional state of the agent. Maes concludes with the observation that the particular interactions in which the user engages can be more important than fancy graphics. The paper is well written, clear and concise. It includes several figures of the presented systems and a sufficient list of references.
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