I don't know if anyone here has played around much with second life. For those unfamiliar with it, the concept is basically a 3D virtual world where almost everything is created by the users. It's an absolutely fascinating concept, and one which becomes even more so when some of the more unique user experiences are examined. Among the notables are a psychologist's virtual reproduction of a schizophrenic's perception of a mental hospital, a hellish abstraction of Hiroshima made by a Japanese prostitute, disabled people who feel they've had a look at the other side of the fence by creating a body and voice that would not be prejudged, people who've donned a new race or gender to do the same, and even churches with a Sunday mass. It all seemed unbelievably cool, but after playing around for a few minutes I got a new understanding of an old skit on the simpsons. After refusing to mow the lawn, Bart winds up with a chance to try out a virtual reality environment. It presents him with a computer generated lawn, which he enthusiastically mows with glee. It is really cool that I could now walk up a virtual hill, gaze up at an artificial star filled night, attend a virtual ralley for some cause, or do any of the other things recreated there. But I can do any of that in the real world, with a much higher resolution and integration with my senses. It might be awesome if I was somehow locked away from the things in the world which I enjoy. But, I'm not, and my occasional attempt to find entertainment in second life after reading some new human interest piece on the the game always ended pretty quickly.
That is, until I read a story about svarga on slashdot. A user created experiment to form an artificial ecosystem. Now 'that' is something I can't do in the real world. Further investigation turned up the fact that there's a small, but fairly active, group playing around with artificial life and ecosystem concepts within second life. A google newsgroup link is over here, and in second life the groups home is Terminus. A couple works in progress are schools of fish along with the gridlice of Terminus.
On the surface, it's a fantastic medium for playing around with artificial life, artificial intelligence, and in particular AI techniques which could make use of the heavy stream of human activity and complex but still relatively easy to navigate environment it would have available to study or interact with. Now, the downside. The code faces a harsh size limitation, which is acceptable. Additionally, the code has to be in the form of an extraordinarily simplistic scripting language. Not only should thoughts of pointers be left behind, but arrays and...yes...even include statements. Primitive is not an understatement here. It's still a pretty cool concept to play around with, even with those limitations. Certainly the limitation gives a new significance to the idea of looking for complex behaviour rising from the interactions of simple structures.
I can at least see a little bit of hope for something more though. The scripting language does have functions to send and receive text off of the main server and onto the internet at large. The obvious conclusion being a client side program to act as the main brain for a virtual animal. The animal's actual code only there for quick reflex actions and communication with that main, client side, "brain". I'm not really sure how viable that idea is though. Send and receive attempts are throttled per user, but at a rate which might still offer itself up as a possibility for getting more complex code into play. And, if not, it can't help but be entertaining to try and reach that potentially nonexistant goal.
I'm not really hoping for much to emerge from the environment as far as leaps in AI technology go. But, I think it might be just as much fun to watch the old tried and true being applied to a 'kinda' new environment.
