A Virtual Virtual World?
Science a Go Go is running a story on the NEW TIES project, a virtual world that’s to be populated with 1,000 artificial personalities who (”that”?) will hopefully evolve into “an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction.”
It’s not clear from the site or the story whether the world will be simulated in 3D or only conceptually, but the software agents that (”who”?) are to populate it will understand concepts such as “near,” and will need to transport resources from one place to another. According to the story, though, NEW TIES is also developing “a state-of-the-art visualization for its interface, to make its agents more comprehensible to a public well versed in The Sims and other computer realities.” The simulation is “about to be switched on,” Science a Go Go says.
As a huge fan of stuff like Conway’s Life and paper-and-pencil Turing Machines when I was a kid, I love stuff like this, and I can’t wait to look through the virtual window at what the NEW TIES population is getting up to. The project is hoping to generate complex emergent behaviors from the simulated population, but on thing I’m not clear on is what exactly we’d learn from that. Can anyone weigh in with some thoughts here?
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Artificial World, Artificial Life…
I’ve mentioned this sort of thing previously - my favorite being the post on artificial fish inside the Second Life virtual simulation (reLink). Now comes news via the 3pointD blog of something a bit different: an artificial world for only artif…
I think they have taken the concept of camp chairs to new heights. Why skill-grind? Why even play? Why even be AFK? I mean…why even *be*? Just have an NPC in there doing stuff for you…always.
Somehow, I can’t help thinking these creatures are going to start having drama and bitching about lag before long.
Hey, can I adopt one?
haha, you’re so right, Prok. And I *love* the idea of adopting one. Although somehow I suspect the letters home won’t be everything we’d want them to be.
Well, I can see lots of possibilities for the MetEx here, where we can short them, buy futures in them, also I want to race mine. Go, Bluey!
[…] Mark’s post on 3pointD.com about NEW TIES, a Virtual Virtual World, caught my attention a few weeks back. This is a fascinating project and I am eager to see the kinds of emergent behavior we can expect — and can’t expect! — to see result from the interactions of these agents. After reading the Science-a-GoGo piece, I remained curious as to how exactly they have been developed to be “sufficiently complex” and their environment “demanding.” The Discovery Channel’s more recent coverage of the story this week speaks more to this, though only a bit. […]
[…] Descubro el blog de Mark Wallace […]
i like to exoeriment