Dancing with virtual wolves

The MIT team play at being wolves

By BBC News Online's Alfred Hermida

Imagine if you could become part of a wolf pack, challenging other animals for dominance.

This is what a new project called Alpha Wolf by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, US, allows you to do.

Graphics look like pencil sketches

They have created a virtual wolf pack where individuals can play at being puppies and form social relations with other puppies in the group.

The researchers say that by exploring how wolves interact, they hope to shed light on how people behave toward each other.

"One of the main things you see when you are interacting with the wolves is that your actions have an effect on other people," says Bill Tomlinson of the Synthetic Characters Group at the MIT Media Laboratory.

"One of the things that people are less aware of in their daily environment is the effect their actions have on other people," he told the BBC's Go Digital programme.

"This is a way for people to learn how their actions have an effect on others through their social environment."

Howl, growl or whimper

The Alpha Wolf project presents a synthetic wolf pack comprised of autonomous and semi-autonomous wolves, which interact with each other much as real wolves do.

This is just the first sketches of how you might go about endowing computers with social confidence

Bill Tomlinson

It allows multiple characters to interact through a graphical setting showing crudely drawn wolves.

You control the emotional state of a wolf by howling, growling or whimpering into microphones. You can also encourage a wolf to interact with other wolves, or to break off an interaction.

"The puppies start off asleep and you have to make noises into the microphone to wake them up," says Mr Tomlinson.

"In terms of negotiating social relations, most of it relates to the dominance and submission between puppies.

"So it you want to try to dominate another member of the pack, you growl at them. If you want to submit, you whine and if you just feel like playing you can then bark," he explains.

Intelligent virtual creatures

Through this project, the researchers are trying build the computational scaffolding for intelligent computer systems.

Tomlinson: Looking to build intelligent computer systems

"By intelligence, we don't mean creatures that can play chess or anything like that," says Mr Tomlinson.

"We're talking about the basic, everyday common sense that animals exhibit - the ability to find food, the ability to know who they like, to build simple emotional relations with each other."

"Just like the graphics look like they've been drawn like a pencil sketch, the code underlying all of this is just the first sketches of how you might go about endowing computers with social confidence," says Mr Tomlinson.

"In terms of the code we've written, hopefully we've started to make a sketch of how it might be, the direction you might go with this if you wanted to take it further

The researchers at MIT chose wolves because they exhibit very stereotyped and intelligent social relations with each other.

It is an extension of previous work by the MIT Media Lab's Synthetic Characters Group on the creation of autonomous virtual creatures.

The group aims to combine ideas from a range of disciplines such as animal behaviour, traditional character animation, artificial intelligence and computer graphics to build interactive characters.

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