Virtual Worlds 2008, RealXTend, OpenCog,…
It’s been a while since I posted anything here, and I won’t try to do justice to everything that has happened for Novamente LLC in the last months. Instead, this blog post just highlights a few of the many exciting pieces of news in the Novamente universe.
First of all, we’re going to be present at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in Los Angeles in 2008, showing off our virtual pets in the Multiverse virtual world.
Next, among a variety of other AI consulting projects for various commercial customers and government agencies, we’ve recently undertaken two interesting customer-focused projects specifically oriented toward AI in virtual worlds:
- a collaboration with RealXTend, aimed at putting our smart virtual pets in their virtual world
- a project for a government agency, creating a simulation game in multiverse in which human players and AI’s cooperate, with a view toward studying variations in the patterns of game play among humans of different cultural backgrounds
Finally, Novamente LLC has launched an open-source AGI project, the OpenCog project at opencog.org. Novamente has contributed a significant amount of AI software code to the OpenCog project, and has also contributed an extensive AGI design called OpenCogPrime. The aim of this project launch is to accelerate progress toward powerful artificial general intelligence by bringing additional collaborators into the process of advancing the AGI code and ideas developed at Novamente LLC during 2001-2008; and also to allow Novamente LLC to focus more closely on its business of creating the world’s most intelligent virtually agents for online virtual worlds and games.
In this era the world has seen a long list of examples of commercial firms profiting considerably from their work with open-source code-bases, and we fully expect Novamente LLC to form yet another example on this list. However, I hasten to add that Novamente’s virtual-agent product code remains closed-source and proprietary, along with certain business-critical AI components. Furthermore, as Novamente moves to launch increasingly intelligent virtual agents in online worlds and games, the knowledge inherent in these agents’ minds — learned via interactions with human teachers and other agents — will itself form an increasingly valuable asset.
We are excited about the power the free and open source development methodology has for accelerating AGI progress, and look forward to collaborating with academia, industry and independent researchers to further advance this very important technology, for mutual benefit.