Broad agents

Abstract

The Oz project at Carnegie Mellon is developing technology for dramatic virtual worlds. One requirement of such worlds is the presence of broad, though perhaps shallow, agents. To support our needs, we are developing an agent architecture that provides goals and goal directed reactive behavior, emotional state and its effects on behavior, some natural language abilities (especially pragmatics based language generation), and some memory and inference abilities. We are limiting each of these capacities whenever necessary to allow us to build a broadly capable, integrated agent.In attempting to construct a broad agent, constraints seem to arise between components of the architecture. In this brief note, we discuss some of these constraints.