What might be a good testing ground for the first generation of AGI in games?
The most obvious way to put intelligent pets into games would be in sandbox type games like The Sims 2: Pets. There, you are trying to make money, but if the pets do random, funky, non-deterministic things, that could still be okay. In games that are more tightly controlled, it would be harder to make the animals adaptive without throwing off the core gameplay. You spoke at the Foresight Vision Weekend in Palo Alto about Novamente’s flocks of virtual parrots sharing a store of knowledge. What is the purpose of having a collective parrot unconscious? That is part of the secret of making it scalable. The only way on current processors you are going to get hundreds of parrots per computer is to have them share a lot of their knowledge. Anything that two parrots both know should be shared in some abstracted format rather than redundantly, which is of course different from you and me. Of course, you don’t want to have so much collective knowledge that you squelch all the diversity and varia
