[MUD-Dev] Virtual worlds as a Society of Mind

[Frank Crowell]

[originally was a response to a thread I started, but I didn't want to
hijack it]

From: "Ted L. Chen" <tedlchen at yahoo.com>
> Frank Crowell wrote

>> FEAR (Flexible Embedded Agent aRchitecture) is an Open Source
>> project that is an AI based on animat or the AI of virtual
>> creatures.  They have implemented a library, development kit, and
>> an interface to Quake 2.  According to the developers,

> The old game-AI design rules still apply.  Cheat if you can get
> away with it and definately cheat if the player isn't looking.  :)

As I was attempting to respond to this, several things floated
through my head and although it didn't directly related to animat,
it related to game AI or even strangely enough with the concept that
the virtual world is the AI.  It may sound creepy at first but if
you take the 10,000 mile aerial trip and look down again on a
virtual world such as a game server, you may actually wonder if you
are not looking inside some cybernetic mind or a society of mind.

"Society of Mind" comes from Marvin Minsky's work dealing with the
autonomous nature of the mind and its composition of thousands of
agents.  It been a long time since I read the book, so I am fuzzy on
the details.

But here are some artifacts that suggests that virtual worlds today
is just an attempt to build an artifical mind.  Do you think the
Noble committee will just come to me automatically or do I have to
email someone?

I don't drink or do drugs, I just write like I do.  There is a meme
in the techno world now to "embed everything" and to "go wireless
everywhere".  But as I was thinking of alternative to FEAR I could
see an approach to embed everything with smarts.  So instead of a
singular brain, you have an augmented brain. I may be making this
stuff up as I go along, but I believe there is material on the Net
that suggests creating objects that can broadcast their properties.
On paper the idea of smart cars and roads have been around.  The
designs were based on devices broadcasting to cars, such as a road
marker saying "slow down accident 1.5 miles ahead".  Or the wheel
device saying, "chuck hole ahead, go left, no no i mean your other
left.  argh we are dead."  Ok that didn't work out too good.

One of the first projects I ever worked on was associative memory.
The basic design is that you have a shouter shout "anyone have the
value tom".  Then each unit, in parallel looks to see if they have
"tom" and report their results.  You get the same simulated behavior
in a mud.  Just shout any question and often you get an answer.
Sometimes you get "shut your hole", but I don't think there was a
hardware model in associative memory for that.

Someone coined "social computing" for when humans are used in a
computer environment to do a simple memory lookup or to solve a
problem -- simple or complex.  I don't believe I made up "social
computing".

Other parts of virtual worlds is that it holds a model of a world
that you have never really been in.  But it could also hold a model
of your real world except you would have to describe a lot of things
and it wouldn't look as accurate as your real world.

The other components then are the autonomous agents/mobs and objects
with embedded smarts. For example instead of you looking at a lamp
and determining the properties, you can ask the lamp about it's
properties.  Actually, at this point everything looks the same-- the
characters with human operators, mobs, and objects.

Now here is the wierd part.  I imagined a noisey session, a
blabbermouth session. Sort of what happens when a new server opens
up and newbies and veterans first get on the server.  There is a
period of time when the shouting is constant until all the entities
(in this case players) have reached some kind of (*I need a word
here*) and then things settle down.  So the blabbermouth period is
for new objects to catch up on things and maybe for old objects to
modify themselves or even to retire.

Here is a sample of a blabbermouth sessions (made up, not an actual
transcript):

  new frog shouts, "is there water near here?"

  new elm shouts "where do i stand?"

  second new elm shouts "what color are elm leaves?"

  someone shouts "green"

  second new elm shouts "why are my leaves not green?"

  someone else shouts "take it to tells!"

This method works as a way to distribute information (knowledge) and
also to re-define assumptions.  I get the feeling that in the
biological brain there are rare periods of total quiet -- just some
periods are noisier than other periods until the dream state.  In
REM, it's like everyone is moving all the furnitures at the same
time.

I could go on but I have no clean way to end this.

frank


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev