Creatures: Entertainment Software Agents with Artificial Life

  • Authors:

  • Stephen Grand;Dave Cliff

  • Affiliations:

  • CyberLife Technology Ltd, Quayside, Bridge Street, Cambridge CB5 8AB, UK E-mail: steve.grand@cyberlife.co.uk;Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge MA 02139, USA E-mail: davec@ai.mit.edu

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 1998

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present a technical description of Creatures, a commercialhome-entertainment software package. Creatures provides asimulated environment in which exist a number of synthetic agents thata user can interact with in real-time. The agents (known as’’creatures‘‘) are intended as sophisticated ’’virtual pets‘‘. Theinternal architecture of the creatures is strongly inspired by animalbiology. Each creature has a neural network responsible forsensory-motor coordination and behavior selection, and an ’’artificialbiochemistry‘‘ that models a simple energy metabolism along with a’’hormonal‘‘ system that interacts with the neural network to modeldiffuse modulation of neuronal activity and staged ontogeneticdevelopment. A biologically inspired learning mechanism allows theneural network to adapt during the lifetime of a creature. Learning includesthe ability to acquire a simple verb–object language.Additionally, both the network architecture and details of thebiochemistry for a creature are specified by a variable-length’’genetic‘‘ encoding, allowing for evolutionary adaptation throughsexual reproduction. Creatures, available on Windows95 platforms since late 1996, offers users an opportunity to engage withArtificial Life technologies. In addition to describing technicaldetails, this paper concludes with a discussion of the scientificimplications of the system.