today's video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. but your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face. a group of researchers from rensselaer polytechnic institute is working to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others.
the characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team.
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.
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