Entertainment: Lifelike Autonomous Agents

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. ” Arti-ficial life is a very broad discipline which spans such diverse topics as artificial evolution, artificial ecosys-tems, 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. The goal of building an autonomous agent is as old as the field of AI itself. The artificial life community has initiated a radically different approach to this goal, which focuses on fast, reactive behavior, rather than on knowledge and reasoning, as well as on adaptation and learning. Its approach is largely inspired by biology, and more specifically the field of ethology, which attempts to understand the mechanisms animals use to demonstrate adaptive and successful behavior. Autonomous agents can take many different forms, depending on the nature of the environment they inhabit. If the environment is the real phys-ical environment, then the agent takes the form of an autonomous robot. Alternatively, one can build 2D or 3D animated agents that inhabit simulat-ed physical environments. Finally, so-called knowbots, software agents or interface agents are disembodied entities that inhabit the digital world of computers and computer networks [8]. There are obvious applications for all these types of agents. For example, autonomous robots have been built for surveillance, exploration, and other tasks in environments that are unac-cessible or dangerous for human beings. There is a long tradition of build