RPI Creates Intelligent Avatar

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, have created a virtual character with the reasoning abilities of a 4 year old child.

"...At a recent conference on artificial intelligence, the researchers unveiled the “embodiment” of their success to date: “Eddie,” a 4-year-old child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age."

“Current avatars in massively multiplayer online worlds — such as Second Life — are directly tethered to a user’s keystrokes and only give the illusion of mentality,” said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. “Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things.”

"Such characters can only be engineered by coupling logic-based artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques with the processing power of a supercomputer, according to Bringsjord..."