Creatures: Entertainment Software Agents with Artificial Life

We present a technical description of Creatures, a commercial home-entertainment software package. Creatures provides a simulated environment in which exist a number of synthetic agents that a user can interact with in real-time. The agents (known as “creatures”) are intended as sophisticated “virtual pets”. The internal architecture of the creatures is strongly inspired by animal biology. Each creature has a neural network responsible for sensory-motor coordination and behavior selection, and an “artificial biochemistry” that models a simple energy metabolism along with a “hormonal” system that interacts with the neural network to model diffuse modulation of neuronal activity and staged ontogenetic development. A biologically inspired learning mechanism allows the neural network to adapt during the lifetime of a creature. Learning includes the ability to acquire a simple verb–object language.Additionally, both the network architecture and details of the biochemistry for a creature are specified by a variable-length “genetic” encoding, allowing for evolutionary adaptation through sexual reproduction. Creatures, available on Windows95 platforms since late 1996, offers users an opportunity to engage with Artificial Life technologies. In addition to describing technical details, this paper concludes with a discussion of the scientific implications of the system.

[1]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[2]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: foundations , 1986 .

[3]  Craig W. Reynolds.  Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model , 1987, SIGGRAPH.

[4]  David E. Goldberg,et al.  Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning , 1988 .

[5]  S. Levy.  Artificial life: the quest for a new creation , 1992 .

[6]  John R. Koza,et al.  Genetic programming - on the programming of computers by means of natural selection , 1993, Complex adaptive systems.

[7]  Bruce Blumberg,et al.  Action-selection in hamsterdam: lessons from ethology , 1994 .

[8]  Karl Sims,et al.  Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition , 1994, Artificial Life.

[9]  Demetri Terzopoulos,et al.  Artificial fishes: Autonomous locomotion, perception, behavior, and learning in a simulated physical world , 1994 .

[10]  Joseph Bates,et al.  The role of emotion in believable agents , 1994, CACM.

[11]  Randall D. Beer,et al.  A Dynamical Systems Perspective on Agent-Environment Interaction , 1995, Artif. Intell..

[12]  Michael A. Arbib,et al.  The handbook of brain theory and neural networks , 1995, A Bradford book.

[13]  Dave Cliff,et al.  Tracking the Red Queen: Measurements of Adaptive Progress in Co-Evolutionary Simulations , 1995, ECAL.

[14]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Artificial life meets entertainment: lifelike autonomous agents , 1995, CACM.

[15]  Randall D. Beer,et al.  On the Dynamics of Small Continuous-Time Recurrent Neural Networks , 1995, Adapt. Behav..

[16]  M. Boden.  The Philosophy of Artificial Life , 1996 .

[17]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Toward the Evolution of Dynamical Neural Networks for Minimally Cognitive Behavior , 1996 .

[18]  Stanley J. Rosenschein,et al.  A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction , 1996 .

[19]  角 康之.  "Artificial Life V"に参加して , 1996 .

[20]  James C. Lester,et al.  Increasing believability in animated pedagogical agents , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[21]  P. Maes,et al.  Old tricks, new dogs: ethology and interactive creatures , 1997 .

[22]  Joseph Bates,et al.  Personality-rich believable agents that use language , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[23]  Barbara Hayes-Roth,et al.  Story-marking with improvisational puppets , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[24]  Inman Harvey,et al.  Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life , 1997 .

[25]  Dave Cliff,et al.  Creatures: artificial life autonomous software agents for home entertainment , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[26]  Dave Cliff,et al.  The Creatures Global Digital Ecosystem , 1998, Artificial Life.

[27]  A. Mackay.  On complexity , 2001 .

[28]  Philipp Slusallek,et al.  Introduction to real-time ray tracing , 2005, SIGGRAPH Courses.