Intelligence in Artifical Worlds

Could an intelligent world exist within your computer?

There are various virtual worlds that exist inside computers today:

• There are virtual worlds like Second Life that have been deliberately created
  
• There are virtual worlds within computer games

First lets examine what happens in these virtual worlds. When a participant enters Second Life, she comes across a world that she has created along with the other participants. So if she constructs a house, this house is now part of Second Life and she and others in this virtual world can see it and enter it and perform various activities inside it.

In a computer game the player enters the virtual world and plays a game envisioned by the creator of the game. For example, in a racing game the player could be one of the cars participating in the race. The race track, the number of cars, and the whole environment inside the game has been previously envisioned and created by the creator of the game.

Artificial AI

The intelligence of these virtual worlds comes from the intelligence of the participants who are controlling their avatars to behave in certain ways. It also comes from the creators of the objects inside these worlds. In the case of Second Life the person who created the house decided its architecture. In the case of a computer game the creator of the game envisioned the gameplay.

In computer games today Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of gameplay. Often situations are added within the game to make gameplay appear intelligent. So for example, if you hit a lot of shots with your backhand the computer game learns to adapt, just as a human opponent on a tennis court would. In a game of shooting, your opponent would evade your bullets by ducking, rolling, just as a human would.

Real Intelligence

But is there any real intelligence in these virtual worlds. Before we decide whether there is any real intelligence we probably have to define what would be considered intelligence. Without getting too ambitious we will define intelligence to be something taking place within the game that is not envisioned by the creators.



Let me give some examples of what I consider intelligent behaviour and then you can decide whether or not that is really intelligent.

1. In a computer game a multiplicity of simple events may lead to emergent behaviour. Lets take this example from Wikipedia, take a racing game in which cars are programmed to avoid crashing, and they encounter an obstacle in the track: the cars might then maneuver to avoid the obstacle causing the cars behind them to slow and/or maneuver to accommodate the cars in front of them and the obstacle. The programmer never wrote code to specifically create a traffic jam, yet one now exists in the game.
2. Let us consider another example. One could create a world in Second Life or any other virtual world and populate it with happiness seeking humanoids. These humanoids though inherently similar could all start to behave uniquely based on what they choose/encounter for getting happiness. One humanoid could start hitting other humanoids, another could start kissing other humanoids, another could start playing with the rocks available in its environment and so on. Each humanoid would start behaving in ways in which the creator of this world never imagined.

I think virtual worlds are beginning to have small amounts of intelligence in them. This is just the start. More and more intelligence will be incorporated into the virtual worlds. That is my premise do you agree?