Sentient Technology
Sentient Technology
Dateline: 04/10/00
Creature Labs, formerly known as Cyberlife Technology Ltd., is the developer of the highly successful Creatures range of computer games that have sold more then 1 million copies world-wide. As such it is the most commercially successful example of Artificial Life technology, creating intelligent and believable life forms through the modelling of the underlying biological structures that give way to life-like behaviour in the real world. The company approaches the problem through simulation implementing their own unique software which is ideally suited to the construction and modelling of large-scale virtual worlds inhabited by hundreds and thousands of living characters.
Previous articles on Creatures will provide you with the technological background and related material. The world's population of norns is currently around the five million mark (source: Cyberlife Research Limited), making them more common than many familiar natural species. Let's briefly consider the secret for the commercial success of such scale for the company involved in a rather exotic, bottom up approach to ALife. Admittedly, original entertainment products will always generate a significant revenue, but there are numerous other factors: hundreds of Web sites run by enthusiasts, including adoption agencies for unwanted norns, plus "norn genome project" sites, where users try to unravel the meaning of the creatures' genome. The ability to add and exchange creatures and objects in their world provides users with an outlet for their creativity. Creatures Developer Network, a Creature Labs-sponsored free forum and knowledge base available to any current or would-be agent or add-on developer, offers a variety of tools, reference materials and documentation. Some of the sites for developers are amazing: The Creatures Developer Resource is the best example how detailed and serious this approach can become. Other areas, like norn "genetic engineering", are also covered in detail with free tutorials and documentation. All in all, Creatures has become a vast, worldwide scientific experiment in Artificial Life.
There's been some changes behind the scene quite recently. A major restructuring programme has begun, changing the company name and moving away from industrial and business applications to focus exclusively on entertainment products. Among the new PC products planned for the future is the 3D real-time strategy game "Beasts" (working title), plus a stand alone application derived from the Creatures 3 PC CD-Rom enabling Internet users to communicate and exchange Creatures online on a global basis.
Perhaps more importantly (for the ALife community at least), Steve Grand, co-founder and technical director of Cyberlife Technology Ltd., has left to set up his own company. Cyberlife Research Limited Ltd. (CRL) has been founded in order to continue and extend Steve's vision for his artificial life technology, in a more conducive environment than a computer games company. It is being set up as a small, slow-growth enterprise, focusing in the early stages almost exclusively on the development of the next generation of artificial life form technology. Creatures can be considered as the First Generation of Cyberlife technology: CRL's goal now is to embed living creatures into hardware. Imagine what teams of such brains, built into a chip and mass-produced, can do for our everyday lives...
A key to this new approach, called sentient technology, is not in the individual techniques but in their integration. It is the complex integration of components to create artificial brains, with biologically realistic and varied mental attributes such as drives and needs, memory, attention and personality. No immense knowledge bases and symbolic processing: just a lots of little dumb things tied together. But putting electronic neurons and simulated biochemical structures together to create a single entity with a mind of its own is a tough job, so people at CRL started several interesting projects to test the real-world performance of their ideas.
The Psychoprocessor project is developing a new system architecture for creating very complex neural structures, designed specifically for rapid processing of the complex neural structures. This will be a hybrid device, using standard digital components such as RAM, DSP chips and discrete logic. The goal is to develop a cheap, small, general-purpose controller device, capable of learning how to interpret complex input signals, plan a response and produce sequences of coordinated output signals in order to achieve its plan.
Going a step further, CRL's researchers are planning to build several very advanced - flying, swimming or wheeled - robotic projects. As if previous statements were not bold enough, they think that one of the biggest obstacles to progress in robotics is that current projects are too simple and encourage the wrong kind of thinking about the real-world problems.
By now you may probably think that the whole thing is too ambitious and over-hyped. However, CRL's team has some impressive, publicly and scientifically recognized results behind them, and I would really like to see if they can do it again. If they can't, it will still be an important experience. But if they can, the effects will be revolutionary.
Cyberlife Research Limited offers an extensive list of articles related to Artificial Life and their technology at their site.