Learning and Contamination in Virtual Worlds

The most recent advances of artificial life scientific research are opening up a new frontier: the creation of simulated life environments populated by autonomous agents. In these environments artificial beings can interact, reproduce and evolve [4, 6, 15], and can be seen as laboratories whereto explore the emergence of social behaviours like competition, cooperation, relationships and communication [5, 7]. It is still not possible to approach a reasonable simulation of the incredible complexity of human or animal societies, but these environments can be used as a scientific orartistic tool to explore some basic aspects of the evolution [1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. The combination of these concepts with robotics technology or with immersive-interactive 3D environments (virtual reality) are changing quickly well known paradigms like digital life, manmachineinterface, virtual world. The virtual world metaphor becomes interesting when the artificial beings can develop some form of learning, increasing their performances, adaptation, and developing the ability to exchange information with human visitors. In this sense the evolution enhances the creative power and meaningful of these environments, and human visitors experience an emotion of a shift from a simplified simulation of the reality to a real immersion into an imaginary life. We may think that these realization are the first sparks of a new form of life: simulated for the soft-alife thinkers, real for the hard-alife thinkers, or a simple imaginary vision for the artists