AlphaWolf: Social Learning, Emotion and Development in Autonomous Virtual Agents

• Main Authors: Bill Tomlinson, Bruce Blumberg
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Canis lupus; gray wolf
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.2.1125; http://characters.media.mit.edu/Papers/WRACCameraReady.pdf

We present research in synthetic social behavior for interactive virtual characters. We describe a model from the natural world, the gray wolf (Canis lupus), and the social behavior exhibited by packs of wolves, to use as the target for an interactive installation entitled AlphaWolf, which was shown at SIGGRAPH 2001. We offer a computational model that captures a subset of the social behavior of wild wolves, involving models of learning, emotion and development. There is a range of real-world applications of synthetic social behavior, from short-term possibilities such as autonomous characters for computer games, to long-term applications such as computer interfaces that can interact more appropriately with humans by utilizing human social abilities.