Practice makes perfect: agent development through rehearsal

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Practice makes perfect agent development through
rehearsal
Presented at ACAL03 PhD Consortium
Tony MeyerResearch commenced 20th September 2002
Principal SupervisorC.H. Messom
Co-SupervisorM. Johnson
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Background

• Combination of traditional alife (model life to
  understand life and create better agents) and
  theatre (model life to understand life and
  entertain).
• Hayes-Roth Virtual Theatre group at Stanford
  focused on improvisational performances by agents
  (for entertainment).
• Pinhanez at M.I.T. Media Lab live stage
  performances by synthetic actors. Focused on
  temporal flexibility.

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Research Questions

• Develop a model for improvising (in a rehearsal)
  synthetic actors (story knowledge, character
  knowledge, domain knowledge, affect information).
• Learning algorithms to enable development through
  the rehearsal process.
• Synthetic actors will be cast in two productions
  over 2004. Over the duration of the rehearsal
  period the synthetic actor system will be
  improved with the intention that by the end of
  the period the synthetic actors are as capable of
  contributing to the rehearsal process as the
  human actors.

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Significance

• Although research is in the entertainment domain
  specificially stage theatre the techniques
  equally apply to other areas film, games,
  education, personal-assistant agents, and so
  forth.
• Formal practices are a commonly used training
  technique (by humans) in real life this allows
  simulated life to learn from existing material,
  or alongside humans.

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Questions

• If you would like more information, please see
• http//www.massey.ac.nz/tameyer/
• research/computertheatre
• This includes papers at varying levels of
  technicality, from newspaper article to research
  proposal.