Virtual Thought

Finally, an AI project to get excited about: A fully computer-generated society with its own culture.

I think this is exciting because, as I was discussing with a friend of mine, I don’t think “brain-in-a-jar”-type research comes close to simulating intelligence. I think dismissing the factor that embodiment, both physically and socially, can have on intelligence is the Wrong Way to Go.

The article doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the startup conditions: has a language been provided? Obviously something like geography already exists… but how much of this artificial physical world is simulated? Are there other animals besides these proto-intelligences? Considering that we multi-cellulars used to be single-cellualrs, and, we think, pieces of our cells used to be other single-cellular creatures (e.g. the mitochondria, power-house of the cell) then it’d be neat to see this artificial society evolve in the face of disease and other physical pressures.

How cool!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 12:08 pm and is filed under cool, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.