Creatures: Artificial Life Autonomous Software Agents for Home Entertainment

This paper gives a technical description of Creatures, a commercial home-entertainment software package. Creatures provides a simulated environment in which exist a number of synthetic agents that a user can interact with in real-time. The agents (known as “creatures”) are intended as “virtual pets”. The internal architecture of the creatures is inspired by animal biology. Each creature has a neural network responsible for sensory-motor coordination and behavior selection, and an “artificial biochemistry” that models a simple energy metabolism along with a “hormonal” system that interacts with the neural network to model diffuse modulation of neuronal activity and staged ontogenetic development. A Hebbian learning mechanism allows the neural network to adapt during the lifetime of a creature. Additionally, both the network architecture and details of the biochemistry for a creature are specified by a variable-length “genetic” encoding, allowing for evolutionary ada...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Stephen Grand, Dave Cliff, Anil Malhotra
• Keywords: AGENTS 1997, Home-entertainment Software Package, Neural Network, Security Privacy, Simple Energy Metabolism