2008: Half a Billion for New Funding in Virtual Worlds

Here’s an interesting factoid posted by Don Reisinger over at CNET: last year about half a billion was invested in 63 different virtual worlds. These game-like online environments are used for work, socialization, play, and education.

Reisinger says venture funding tapered off a little for new virtual worlds in the fourth quarter, just as funding for everything else slowed down.

Dangerous Russian Flirting Software Passes Turing Test; May Have Gaming Applications

Ina Fried over at CNET’s News.com noted that “flirting” software devised by Russian programmers can fool online chatters, and potentially be used to pilfer passwords and other personal data. Could it be the Turing Test has been met for nefarious purposes? This was famously postulated by British mathematician Alan Turing who wrote in 1950 that a machine would have attained apparent sentience if a person did not know he or she were corresponding with a machine (via teletype at the time).

Other efforts have been made in this arena, mainly thanks to the Loebner prize, which is awarded in a contest each year to companies or individuals. The 2007 winner is Robert Medeksza of Zabaware. Zabaware’s Ultra Hal Assistant 6.1 looks particularly interesting for carrying on fake conversations. Here’s a portion of the product description:

Ultra Hal Assistant is an artificial intelligence conversation simulator. It is capable of being your digital secretary and companion. Talk to Hal in natural English language and Hal will speak back to you. Hal has a huge conversational database and will discuss anything. Hal speaks out loud to you in one of many high quality voices and has several 3D animated characters to choose from. Hal will learn from every sentence that you tell it and over time it will learn [to] like the same things you do, and to talk about topics you like to talk about. In addition to being able to chat with you for entertainment purposes, Ultra Hal can also act as a personal information manager (PIM). Hal can remember and remind you of appointments, it can keep an address book, it can keep a phone book, and it can dial phone numbers for you. Hal will also run programs and recent documents on command, and can help you browse the Internet. You can also run your Hal bot on the AOL Instant Messenger network.

Back to the Russian software, which is available only in Russian so far: Those intrepid Russian hackers have perfected the software to such a degree that folks in chat rooms think they’re flirting with a real person, and thus tend to reveal personal info they otherwise wouldn’t. I wonder if human libidos help machines to pass the Turing Test?

Regardless, as “chatterbox software” keeps improving, perhaps we’ll see the day when the technology is adopted in educational games. Imagine a virtual personal assistant (to wit: an NPC in the game) coaching children, guiding them through tight spots with which they have difficulty, and providing a level of companionship and bonhomie.