Cognitive Teleportation and Situated Embodiment

Throughout this summer, we are conducting a large-scale experiment in which an open-ended population of situated embodied agents bootstrap an ontology and a lexicon from scratch. The agents can teleport between different robot bodies through which they can experience and act upon the world. The agents play a language game, called the guessing game, in which one agent (the hearer) tries to identify through verbal and non-verbal hints from another agent (the speaker) a particular object in the environment. Humans can interact with the artificial agents through the Internet. They can construct their own agent, influence its language, and follow the performance of the agent as it travels between different physical locations.