Building a Synthetic Task Environment to Support Artificial Social Intelligence Research

Abstract

To support research on artificial social intelligence for successful teams (ASIST), an urban search and rescue task (USAR) was simulated within Minecraft to serve as a Synthetic Task Environment (STE). The goal for the development of the present STE was to create an environment that provides ample opportunities to allow ASI agents to demonstrate the theory of mind by making inferences and predictions of humans’ states and actions in the USAR task environment, and in the future to intervene to improve teamwork in real-time. This paper describes the STE design background, design potentials and considerations, rich data collection opportunities, and potential usage for more broad research.