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From: PLai@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Toward a Typology/Topology of Virtual Worlds
Message-ID: <12157@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 2 Dec 90 02:02:25 GMT
Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
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Bob Jacobson says:

>Has anyone thoughts along the lines of how we might create a typology,
>based on the topology, of virtual worlds?  This typology might include
>everything from the static "world" of the written page to the ultra-
>dynamic, interactive virtual worlds that we more often speak about
>here.

Well there is a problem that I have been workin on that is close to this:
Lets say you have an ai that is reading the interactions of a group
of people going through a text base MUG(multi-user game).  This ai is
suppose to simimulate NPC's (non-player characters) and needs to be smart
enough to know what is in a room to interact with the PC's ( human player
characters) in a way that it, the ai, appears like a human.  The problem
is how does the ai generate a local (local to the ai's mind) spatial 
database from reading the text?

There are trivial ways of hard coding this kind of thing, but in
order to do it in a general way, the ai needs to slowly generate relational
connections between objects and chunked objects.  Thus the cyberspace
generated by the ai is a computational mapping of how objects are related
in space, and associated textually.  A few general principles stand out:

1. That the objects have only a spatial meaning in terms of other
   objects - i.e. a thumb is a inch away from the palm
2. Objects are spatially related by transforms, not through coordinate 
   references.
3. Objects are chunked into groups at varying levels, each group able
   to have spatial transforms to other groups.
4. The layout and design of the cyberspace is done for benefit of the ai,
   for the human to see the ai's spatial reasoning requires another layer
   of logic.

                                 PLai


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