Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers unveiled “Eddie,” a 4-year-old virtual child in Second Life who can reason about his own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.

“Our aim is not to construct a computational theory that explains and predicts actual human behavior, but rather to build artificial agents made more interesting and useful by their ability to ascribe mental states to other agents, reason about such states, and have — as avatars — states that are correlates to those experienced by humans,” said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer’s Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project.

“Applications include entertainment and gaming, but also education and homeland defense.”

This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and the team hopes to engineer a version of the Star Trek holodeck — a virtual reality system used onboard the starships that allowed users to interact with the projected holograms of other individuals. Such a system could allow cognitively robust synthetic characters to interact directly with human beings, according to Bringsjord.

See also: AI Meets the Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living in Virtual Worlds