Using Anticipation to Create Believable Behaviour

Although anticipation is an important part of creating believable behaviour, it has had but a secondary role in the field of life-like characters. In this paper, we show how a simple anticipatory mechanism can be used to control the behaviour of a synthetic character implemented as a software agent, without disrupting the user's suspension of disbelief. We describe the emotivector, an anticipatory mechanism coupled with a sensor, that: (1) uses the history of the sensor to anticipate the next sensor state; (2) interprets the mismatch between the prediction and the sensed value, by computing its attention grabbing potential and associating a basic qualitative sensation with the signal; (3) sends its interpretation along with the signal. When a signal from the sensor reaches the processing module of the agent, it carries recommendations such as: "you should seriously take this signal into consideration, as it is much better than we had expected" or "just forget about...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Carlos Martinho, Ana Paiva
• Keywords: AAAI 2006, Anticipatory Mechanism, Intelligent Agents, Simple Anticipatory Mechanism, Synthetic Character