US Army To Use MMOs For Turing Tests

Massively points out an article about new research projects for the US Army. One of the projects will evidently involve testing their AI capabilities in popular MMOs, including World of Warcraft and EVE Online. "They're working on creating 'photorealistic looking and acting human beings' that can think on their own, have emotions and talk in local slang. 'I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they're responding,' Parmentola said. To test out the computer generated humans' 'humanity,' Parmentola and his researchers want to unleash some of their cyber Soldiers into so-called 'massively multi-player online games' such as World of Warcraft or Eve Online — games frequented by thousands of super-competitive human players in teams of virtual characters fighting battles that can last for days. 'We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they're good enough to convince humans that they're actually human,' he said."

Comments

Re:Interesting idea...

[plasmacutter]

... until Blizzard cans their account for using a bot.

Actually, I think they only ban it if it actually plays the game.

On my server there's an AI operating in general: ironforge.

It was there months ago, and when I logged on it was still there.

Some schmo is obviously doing some academic research on online populations, or flame wars. The thing just talks to nobody in normal chat, spewing flamebait like "democrats suck" or "I don't kill babies, thank you very much".

I pointed it out to a bunch of people once, and they reported it.. it's still there.

It manages to bait people into the endless hole that is politics on the internet at least once every evening I happen to be on.

Re:eh , well what else do you call them?

[DriedClexler]

I think you misread it. The meaning in that context was, "I know many of our readers may not have heard of them, but these kinds of games are big now, and they're called ..."

That is, it wants to acknowledge it's bringing in a new term it doesn't expect you to already know. Same as when they'd say, "he accesses the computer through a so-called 'mouse'" in 1990 :-P