(Disney Meets Darwin)
11 Discussion
Virtual Realityc Mustn't be a Lonely Place
Real reality has a lot to do with interacting with other living things. When explorers of virtual reality systems enter into their artificial worlds, they must adapt to the "nature" of these worlds, to some degree. Upon entering, users are often met with a collection of inert, Euclidean objects. Complex computational entities can exist there too, and adapt to the virtual world, and to the human participant as well.
In video games, behavioral entities - moving sprites, warships, race cars, pong balls, cartoon characters - which were already designed to live in a microworld, can be made to adapt to their worlds, through some automatic optimization schemes. They can be successful in their niche, able to deal with gravitation or any other physical laws (whether Newtonian or "Cartoon"), and to respond to the actions of humans and other entities in meaningful ways.
But they could also adapt similarly to the ways in which performers - dancers, actors, comedians - have adapted through feedback with their audiences, by becoming increasingly expressive, entertaining, or funny. Often there is no computable formula for what makes a skit funny or a dance movement provocative. The performer must simply see if it gets a laugh or a good review. It is an optimizing process.
The creatures described in this paper are, of course, not conscious of the fact that they may be getting a laugh, any more than a flower is conscious of the fact that it is attracting a bee. They also have nothing in the way of stimulus/response mechanisms, allowing them to learn as individuals. The population is what learns - it genetically adapts according to the evaluations of the animator, and the settings of the multiple fitness criteria.
12 Improvements
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