Artificial Intelligence is an evolving
aspect of computer science. One th
ing that makes humans intelligent is
our ability to learn from experience. Not only can
we learn from our own experience, but also from
experiences told to us by other people. In order to deci
de how much to trust this information, people need to
form long-term relationships with each other. This is a first step toward forming communities.
The focus of the proposed research is to develop a vi
rtual world that contains autonomous agents that form
relationships with each other and with people. Thes
e agents will be capable of
simple communication with
each other, passing information between the agents. This
combination of social relationships and information
passing will help form a community of autonomous agents
inside the virtual world. Once it is developed, this
virtual community may be used to study how humans form relationships.
The software installation will be based on an existing
research project called the Making Friends Project. The
Making Friends Project uses a code base developed by
the Synthetics Characters Group at the MIT Media
Lab, with significant modifications by my faculty mentor
and me. It is mostly written in Java and has a thin
layer of C and C++ to communica
te with the DirectX graphics.
The Protohuman Project contributes to the areas of mu
lti-agent systems, human-computer interaction, and
interactive animation.