Artificial Life meets Virtual Worlds, produces Spavatars

Was mulling over something I read in a piece Nic Brisbourne wrote earlier this week , about marketing people paying Linden avatars to hang around their clients' sites to make them look populated / popular, virtual world spam, and an aside about a little script that can make the avatar move.

I was nostalgically taken back to some stuff I first looked at some 10 years ago, ie Evolutionary Algorithms and the wider virtual science of Artificial Life.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, in a nutshell Artificial Life (A-Life) is the creation of self organising artificial systems that behave in life like ways. The underlying rules of quite complex behaviour can be very simple, for example "Boids" was an early very simple simulation of the way that flocks of birds fly - see an explanation here, and this YouTube video below



Anyway, seemed to me that those advertising wonks doing this are total amateurs at this game....if you are going to have false punters anyway ( sockpunters? ) why not have a whole swarm of 'em rather than a paltry few, and why not stick some A-Life routines in so that all those fake avatars can go do lots more that just twitch to the vibe. Send em touring in swarms, let em breed with each other.....

In fact, take it one step farther.........add some more complex A-Life routines and your Avatar can just go touring Second Life on its own, you need never bother to go there, Linden gets its visitor numbers up (hey, why not spawn a few million of its own using Genetic Algorithms while you are at it.), then the PR agencies that flog SL presence continue to make money and the poor old client is none the wiser

Unless they read this of course....

And why stop there...program those artificial avatars with some Messages From Your Client, so next time some sucker tries to chat up some gorgeous creature in SL, he/she gets a whole reel of real time Spam.

With realistic facial gestures and manners to boot.

Yes, you have just met a Spavatar .............. Turing would be proud of us

3D Spam - hah! - you haven't even seen the start of it yet......

Hmmm..I wonder if those nice chaps at IBM are building one of these