Building Life-like 'Conscious' Software Agents

Here we will briefly describe action selection and language generation mechanisms in two 'life-like' software agents, CMattie and IDA, and discuss issues that bear on the topics of architectures for behavior control, interdependencies between emotions and goaldbased behaviors, and coordination of scripted and improvised behaviors. These agents are life-like in the sense of interacting with humans via email in natural language. They are 'conscious' only in the sense of implementing a psychological theory of consciousness [3,4]. At this writing we are exploring the transition from scripted language production to more improvised speech generation. We are also investigating deliberative behavior selection mechanisms whereby alternative scenarios are produced and evaluated, and one of them chosen and acted upon. (Supported in part by ONR grant N00014-98-1-0332. This research was done with essential contributions from the Conscious Software Research Group including Art Graesser, Satish Ambati, Ashraf Anwar, Myles Bogner, Arpad Kelemen, Irina Makkaveeva, Lee McCauley, Aregahegn Negatu, Uma Ramamurthy, Zhaohua Zhang)