Socially|Mundane

Second Life bots are on the change. In fact, it is likely that eventually you will converse and interact with someone in SL and it could be a computer controlled robot.

The Associated Press reports on a research project of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory. This is far more than the "Alice" project (already in SL). This is a fully functional robot, apparently.

Well, in reality, Second Life is the test-bed for the robot project. It provides a very inexpensive to test things out. So, chances are you won't run into a lot of these, unless of course someone close to the project decides to leak things otherwise.

To that, I refer to the introduction of mongoose to the Hawaiian Islands to handle the rodent problem in the cain fields. Now, the mongoose are the real problem. Or, the lab that researched 'intelligent' software code oh so long ago. A tiny little command function that was able to copy itself from one computer to another. Absolutely useful!

Until it got out into the wild and became used for malicious purposes, hence the "computer virus' was born.

So, as it relates to Second Life... guys, please keep this one under wraps and tight control.

"His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier."

Source:
The Associated Press: Researchers teach 'Second Life' avatar to think