http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/05/can-novamentes-virtual-dogs-make-a-nintendog-look-dumb/
(((In a word, "Huh?" and in a lot of words, maybe they should start with birds that *don't* talk, like, say, house sparrows.)))
Link: Can Novamente’s virtual dogs make a Nintendog look dumb? » VentureBeat.
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In a presentation made at the Googleplex last year, Goertzel argued that an AGI could never start off with a full set of skills. Much like a developing human brain, it would require substantial training from humans before it matures. Virtual worlds, Goertzel has written, could be ideal training grounds. For one, characters or pets in virtual worlds are far less complicated and expensive to implement and distribute than actual robots. For another, they can come in numerous forms. And, if they work well, lots of people will pay for them.
A virtual dog powered by Novamente’s AI, Goertzel says, would develop its own quirks. At the same time, each individual dog’s AI is connected to a greater whole, so anything it learns can be ready for all the others in almost real time. Balancing the collective dog AI with the individual dog’s AI to maintain each dog’s unique personality is a tricky problem. Goertzel says Novamente has it basically solved. But dogs are just the start. (((I might have known.)))
The medium-term goal, Goertzel says, is a virtual parrot that talks. The natural language processing technology is not ready, but if it gets there, having widely distributed but interconnected virtual talking parrots could be a great way to train an AI to comprehend speech.
Goertzel argues that if virtual world behavior aligns at all with real world behavior, people will spend time and effort to get their virtual parrots to say the right things. (((Or they'll train them to mimic Paris Hilton's hilarious McCain video on Funny or Die – hey, way to go on that Turing Test, Paris!))) The feedback loop described above would make each parrot more appealing to humans and make the AI increasingly capable of understanding speech....
