UDC 001.81:519.68:681.32

Autonomy and Artificial Forms for Amusement and Use as Agents

VKoichi Murakami (Manuscript received August 24, 1999)

This paper describes the attributes that can be given to artificial life forms and intelli- gent agents so that they appear to be alive and posses their own individuality. Also, this paper describes possible architectures for realizing these attributes.

1. Introduction ficial intelligence for the purpose of understand- We started to develop forms of artificial life ing human beings and creating human-like . in 1990, and in 1995 we developed an entertain- The study then branched into several areas, for ment called “TEO – Another Earth” example, engineering, image and voice rec- which can communicate with human beings. ognition, and symbol processing for planning and Then, in 1999 based on this experience, we con- learning. Now, however, these areas are being structed and released an agent on the Internet. integrated into a united effort to study human This paper describes our concept of artificial beings. life, the image of the “living organisms” we intend Agents may possibly change people’s associ- to create, and some architectures for artificial life.1) ations with computers. If a person asks an agent Then, this paper describes various we on a computer screen to do something, the agent have developed, in particular “TEO – Another will carry it out to the best of its capability. Agents Earth,” which we developed in collaboration with will come to be regarded as capable secretaries, Mr. Macoto Tezka, the producer. faithful stewards, obedient servants, and perhaps even close friends. 2. From agents to artificial life However, to create these autonomous enti- An agent is a human expert who helps an- ties, we will have to better understand the difficult other person do something upon request, and an region covered by the theory of communication, interface agent is a computer program that oper- where we have not yet found standard solutions ates as an expert.2) Many researchers are now even to questions regarding communication be- concentrating their energy on the study of artifi- tween human beings. The questions to be solved cial intelligence and agents. For examples of the include “What makes a person want to communi- work being done in this field, see Ref. 2), in which cate with an entity?” and “What makes a person nearly 20 of the foremost researchers in this field want to continue communicating with an entity?” (including Minschy, the most prominent figure in There are a variety of possible answers – for ex- the study of ) discuss agents ample, the entity is cute, friendly, interesting, or from various points of view. in the process of growing. We hypothesize that Researchers originally began studying arti- people want to communicate with an entity or

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agent when they feel that the entity is alive. We to achieve certain goals on a computer. The cannot prove this hypothesis now; however, based autonomous behavior of this mechanism is com- on our implicit knowledge, we can say that hu- pletely different from the random selections of man beings have certain special feelings toward predetermined behaviors that are performed in living organisms. the simulated pet systems which are enjoying re- An artificial life in a computer cannot be gen- cent popularity. The autonomous behavior of an uinely alive, but it can nevertheless appear to be artificial life is dependent on factors in the exter- alive, and it is up to the person who communi- nal environment (e.g., weather, time of day) of the cates with an artificial life to decide whether it user and other living organisms and the artificial appears alive. We therefore have to solve the fun- life’s internal conditions (e.g., degree of hunger, damental question of what makes people feel as emotions, and degree of familiarity with the user). if an artificial life is actually alive. The answer to If we use a conventional this question may come from philosophy, , to realize autonomous behavior, we would have to or physiology, or perhaps the answer has already describe all the conditions of an enormous exter- been given by Walt Disney and Osamu Tezuka, nal environment in a list. This, however, is not a who is a famous Japanese cartoonist. That is, practical approach. In fact, robot researchers have perhaps the answer is that animation gives life faced the same problem. to things and characters. After all, we cannot ig- To achieve its goal, a robot must determine nore the fact that many of the cartoon characters its actions by itself in a dynamic environment that they created have been “living” in our minds. includes moving objects such as people and other robots without hitting them. Therefore, the ar- 3. Architecture of artificial life chitectures developed by robot researchers are The first task of our research into the essen- planning systems which react to conditions. tial properties of artificial life was to build an Figure 1 shows one such architecture we have autonomous mechanism that behaves adaptively developed at Fujitsu. These architectures consist

Reactive planning

Rule base

-if (condition) then (behavior) ... Plan tree

Condition Verification Behavior [External condition] [Internal condition]

Motivation Goal achieved/not achieved Emotion

Strength t

Time attenuation Stimulus

: Information exchange from external environment : Information exchange from internal environment Figure 1 Autonomous architecture.

FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J.,35, 2,(December 1999) 159 K. Murakami : Autonomy and Artificial Life Forms for Amusement and Use as Agents

of three modules: one for recognizing conditions according to motivations internal to the living in the external world, one for judgment (think- organism and that when a living organism dem- ing) based on this recognition, and one for onstrates this autonomy we are likely to regard executing the actions to be taken. The main fea- the organism as possessing a degree of conscious- ture of these architectures is that the three ness. modules are linked with each other in a loop in However, an autonomous mechanism cannot realtime, so that when a robot takes an action in be created simply by designing an artificial life the external world, it quickly recognizes the ef- that reacts to the external environment; it can only fects of the action and then makes the appropriate be created when an artificial life is given much judgement or judgments. Because of this loop the more profound internal conditions. To achieve this, robot maintains an internal analog of the exter- we developed an emotion module with parame- nal world. ters for physiological states such as hunger and In the judgment module, which is the core of fatigue and feelings such as sorrow and joy (see these architectures, behavior is described as a set Figure 1). These parameters quantitatively of rules for actions. The relationships between change depending on the artificial life’s own ac- actions in this module and how they influence the tions, its recognition of external conditions, and robot’s behavior are not predictable but depend the degree to which it achieves its goals. As a re- on conditions in the external world. In other sult, a change in circumstances can produce a new words, individual actions are only meaningful in goal inside the artificial life. terms of external conditions. Consider, for example, the feelings of like and A robot having such an architecture, howev- dislike and assume that an artificial life “likes” er, is not a living organism because it is always an object. If the object is in front of the artificial given a goal in advance. Let us take the example life, the simple goal of “getting the object” is pro- of a cleaning robot that moves around and col- duced. If the object is at a distance, the goals of lects dust and trash while making way for human “finding,” “reaching,” and “getting” the object are beings, cats, dogs and other obstacles. Such a produced. The artificial life then takes the neces- cleaning robot can be made with an extremely high sary actions to attain the produced goal or goals. level of technology and could make enormous con- While executing these actions, the artificial life tributions to society. However, it will only act for monitors and reacts to changes in the environment the purpose of cleaning and will still be just a because the recognition, judgment, and action . modules continue operating in the loop described A living organism can have simultaneous, im- above. If someone brings the target object close portant goals, for example, self-preservation and to the artificial life, it will have achieved its goal reproduction. A living organism might become without the need to move to the object’s original confused when some of these goals conflict with location, so it stops moving. Then, because its goal each other and find which is the most important has been achieved, the artificial life can autono- goal for that situation. It eats when it is hungry, mously take a new action. For example, the looks for a friend when it feels lonely, and sleeps artificial life may be pleased and begin laughing when it is tired. When people see or recognize or dancing or begin to “love” the person who such behavior in a living organism, they try to brought the object and follow that person around. deduce the living organism’s state of mind from Thus, we built an artificial life mechanism which its behavior. The essential points here are that behaves according to its own goals and appears the goals of a living organism are not dictated by as if it has a mind. an external source but are produced autonomously Our first artificial made their debut in

160 FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J.,35, 2,(December 1999) K. Murakami : Autonomy and Artificial Life Forms for Amusement and Use as Agents

Figure 2 “TEO – Another Earth.”

CG Sapporo in 1990. The presentation contained is an imaginary animal called “FinFin” that looks a shark and three jellyfish. The shark chased the like a cross between a dolphin and a bird. Mr. jellyfish when it was hungry, and the jellyfish gath- Macoto Tezka, an artist with a profound knowl- ered together to play with human visitors to their edge of living organisms, helped us to develop TEO world. Wearing data gloves, people could have a in the capacity of producer. Through our discus- type of conversation with the artificial organisms sions with him, we determined that we would not through gestures. In 1992, based on our first at- create a character or artificial organism that sim- tempts, we developed another world of artificial ply flatters and plays with human beings. Instead, life named “Charlotte,” in which 10 artificial or- we decided to create an artificial organism that ganisms lived. These artificial organisms had the has its own emotions and autonomously lives its autonomy mechanism described above, which own life. made them behave with an individuality. Some We succeeded in realizing some degree of au- of them had friendly relations with each other tonomy in TEO. The autonomous architecture while some of them struggled with each other, and which decides FinFin’s behavior also controls the they formed groups similar to the groups that are planning of its strategic behavior. If FinFin is formed in a society of monkeys. hungry and finds food nearby, FinFin will eat it. If FinFin is playing with somebody but does not 4. TEO – Another Earth find any food, it will ask the person for food. If Unfortunately, we lost interest in communi- there is nobody, FinFin will go to another place to cating with these artificial organisms after about eat something. FinFin is an artificial life that in 20 minutes. Then, we made an improved version certain ways appears as intelligent as a dog or called “TEO – Another Earth” (see Figure 2). TEO cat. is an imaginary planet on which various imagi- A living organism reacts to the environment, nary organisms that we can communicate with and if its enemy appears, it will run away. FinFin are living. also has a mechanism to take action in an emer- The first artificial life we developed for TEO gency. A typical example of an emergency for

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FinFin is a person speaking loudly. If a person environment, these users might be wishing they playing with FinFin speaks loudly, FinFin detects could enter the jungle-like world of TEO them- the loud voice through a sensor attached to the selves. computer and immediately runs away. FinFin will 2) Users who enjoy TEO as a game then increase its wariness and not show up for a In an exhibition, we saw five school children while. rush to the demonstration TEO machine and be- FinFin has the emotions described before and gin using it exclusively. While we were observing behaves according to its emotions as if it had its them, they competed with each other for FinFin’s own will. Such behavior sometimes manifests as attention. Girls fed FinFin and called its name disobedience to the person playing with FinFin. tenderly; boys, on the other hand, threatened However, the person can guess what is on FinFin loudly. Playing these types of games is a FinFin’s mind from the context of its behavior and popular way of enjoying TEO among school chil- then act appropriately. This can be the first step dren. of communication. FinFin sometimes listens to 3) Users who simply enjoy communicating with people but does not fully obey instructions. This FinFin function is the fruit of FinFin’s autonomous In the exhibition, we observed that preschool architecture. children enjoyed simply communicating with As explained above, we developed functions FinFin. What was remarkable was their conver- for reacting to circumstances and motivating be- sations with their mothers while they were playing havior using models of emotions and a planning with FinFin. The children and their mothers ac- based on a set of rules. We can predict tively talked to each other about FinFin’s every most but not all of FinFin’s behavior. We believe action. This suggest that an artificial life can serve that FinFin has the changeability, , and as a medium of communication between human dependency of a living organism and is advanced beings. enough for us to have empathy with it. 4) Users who communicate affectionately with Of the people who have bought TEO, 60 per- FinFin cent are female, and many of the buyers also Some users, mainly unmarried young people, bought a personal computer at the same time so have sent messages to our TEO home page ask- they could run TEO. We also found that many ing such questions as “How do you turn off the TEO users have a strong empathy with FinFin computer when FinFin is eating in front of you?,” and enjoy communicating with it. TEO users can “I am anxious about what FinFin is doing while I be classified into the following four groups accord- am absent,” and “How can I feed FinFin while I ing to the way in which they enjoy TEO. am away?” They seem to have been taking care of 1) Users who mainly watch the dynamic chang- and communicating with FinFin with affection for es in the TEO environment over a year. There are many users, chiefly middle-aged From our observations of TEO users, we men, who mostly enjoy watching the changes in conclude that an artificial life communicating the imaginary world. On TEO, a day consists of closely with human beings and behaving autono- 24 hours and a year consists of 365 days. The mously can attract people in various ways. Since natural environment and lives of living organisms communication requires an individuality, an in- alter as time goes by. When night falls, stars and dividuality is a requirement of any artificial life a moon appear and the living organisms sleep. In that functions as a human being’s communication the morning, the living organisms wake up, eat, partner. We think that TEO has proved this. With and sing lively. Watching these changes in the the users of the fourth group described above, daily

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pet-like communication is particularly important. an agent requires an interactive function so that It is therefore important that users are able to the users can help the agent perform a task by make this type of daily communication. conversing with it. The problem here is that cur- rently it is technologically difficult to equip an 5. Development into an agent agent with an interactive function. So far, our The agent we want to construct resembles agent has the following functions: Tin Man or Scarecrow from the movie “The 1) Guidance to home pages Wizard of Oz.” The general image of an agent may By selecting an automatic function, the agent be something like a secretary. Our image of an can guide the user to various points on a home agent, based on the experience we gained in de- page, so the user can look at or read through a veloping TEO, is described below. home page as if he or she were on a bus tour. This is convenient because it allows the user to over- 5.1 User’s feelings toward an agent view the contents of a home page without needing To encourage a user to communicate with an to make extra operations. agent for a long time, functional perfection alone 2) Management of personal information is not enough. We have to design an agent that is For example, if our agent was used as the in some way addictive. TEO users initially felt agent for a home page about pets, it could occa- that FinFin was pretty, but then became more sionally notify the user about information such attracted by FinFin’s complex, autonomous behav- as the pet’s name, date of birth, and when to buy ior. We therefore want to add additional features food for the pet. If the pet’s birthday is approach- to an agent so that users continue to find it inter- ing, the agent could inform the user. If the user’s esting. stock of pet food is becoming short, the agent could advise the user to buy some more (through mail 5.2 Duration of user’s communication order). with an agent 3) Playing with the agent If an agent is functionally perfect but other- As described above, we think this is an im- wise uninteresting, users will communicate with portant function. A function for feeding a user’s it only for a short time. For example, if a user artificial pet, for example, is significant because asks such an agent to book a train ticket for the user can feel like the pet’s owner or one of its Tokyo, the agent might be able to complete the fiends. If the artificial pet eats its food every time task within a minute. Also, in the real world, for the user gives it and takes no action even when it example, managers do not talk all day with their has not been fed, the artificial pet will not seem secretaries, even when they want their secretar- real. Therefore, an artificial pet must ask the user ies to perform a large number of tasks. for food when it feels hungry. Based on our expe- rience with TEO, we included this function in our 5.3 Functional requirements agent. We also gave the agent functions for play There remains the following problem regard- that are specific to the because ing the functional requirements of an agent. agents use the web to communicate with users. Usually, a secretary does not have expert knowl- To allow the user to be actively engaged while ac- edge of a narrow domain, which is the strong point cessing home pages, there is a game-like function of artificial intelligence, but a general knowledge to let the user and the agent jointly look for the of a wide domain. However, in general, it is diffi- pet’s favorite food (e.g., bones) hidden in home cult to create an artificial intelligence that has a pages. Finding and accumulating this food will general knowledge of a wide domain; therefore, give the user a sense of achievement.

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4) Acquisition of users’ profiles and artificial life forms into agents and into hu- Regarding the application of our agent to man interfaces. We will also release an authoring electronic commerce and other on-line activities, system for Internet service providers who intend a future issue will be how to acquire the dynamic to create new products based on these technolo- profiles of users. In various experiments, we have gies. already attempted to acquire the implicit, dynamic profiles of users through the interactive commu- Acknowledgments nications made between the agent and users. The ideas put forward in this paper are the valuable products of research done at the Com- 5. Conclusion puterized Agent Project of Fujitsu Limited. I This paper looked at various topics regard- gratefully thank the project staff for their chal- ing artificial life forms for human amusement and lenges to do what has not yet been attempted. I assistance, for example, the design of their archi- also thank Mr. Macoto Tezka and the other art- tectures and the importance of the appearance of ists who helped us create TEO. autonomy. Then, this paper described an imagi- nary world we have created called “TEO” and an References artificial life form called “FinFin” which inhabits 1) K. Murakami: Interactive TV, Board of In- it. Lastly, this paper looked at various aspects dustrial Investigation. Conversation between regarding the design of intelligent interface agents Human Beings and Computers (joint work). for use on the World Wide Web. 2) Intelligent Agent. Communication of ACM, We will widely incorporate the experience we 37, 7, 1994. have gained from creating these imaginary worlds

Koichi Murakami received the M.Sc. degree in Nuclear Engineering from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan in 1980. He joined Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Kawasaki, Japan in 1980 and was engaged in research of computer graph- ics, artificial intelligence, and parallel computers. In 1991 he was a visiting scholar of Carnegie Melon University, and in 1992 he was awarded the Sakai Special Award. Currently, he is en- gaged in research and development of artificial life and human interfaces. He is a member of the Society of Japan (IPSJ).

164 FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J.,35, 2,(December 1999)