Child-like intelligence created in Second Life

A new artificial intelligence program has been created in Second life that is claimed to have a rudimentary theory of mind and the intelligence of a four-year-old child. The ‘child’ is a product of logic-based artificial intelligence and complex modelling techniques, and operates on what has been said to be the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world.

A creation of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, four-year-old ‘Eddie’ has his own set of beliefs and the ability to reason about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age. This includes a partially-developed "Theory of Mind", which allows him to understand, predict and manipulate the behaviour of other agents and human Second Life residents, with whom researchers expect the technology to be able to one day interact with in the real, physical world.

Please see HERE for the full article at ITNews.com.

Prototype (real) web browser in Second Life

Today I was fortunate to be one of the first people to try out a very early release of a prototype in-world web browser. The tool was announced on the 'Real Life Education in Second Life' group. The latest releases of the SL browser have included a built-in web browser but this has been limited to a single pop up framed window.

This new 'browser' script allows the 'web on prim' technology but with the added advantage of having clickable hyperlinks. Although this function is limited at present, it does appear to work, and it's fast.

The advantages are obvious and, as far as I know, this is the very first instance of this technology in any virtual world. The early prototype has been developed by avatar Kii Lilliehook and is called 'kiibrowser'. Kii has set up a group (html in sl) for those interested in following the development of this long-awaited tool. More updates will follow.

HEA Massively Multi Learner Workshop 2008

The HEA Massively Multi Learner Workshop 2008 to be held on March 18th at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

There is still time to register for this event and it will be a great place to meet, talk about and experience current practice in virtual world education. If you have an SL avatar let us know, if not we will be running an 'introduction' session to get you started. In any case you should bring a headset with mic, and it will be a great opportunity to bring along interested sceptics who need to see what is really going on.

http://www.inspire.anglia.ac.uk/mml08/

http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/events/displayevent.php?id=180