If a virtual human is to exist in any persistent way with an independent life which is also independent of interacting with physical humans then it needs some form of motivation as to what to do with its own "life".
Whilst many models of human motivation exist perhaps the best known, and one which is ripe to be encoded within a virtual human is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Typically an entity should focus on fulfilling lower level needs and only then progress to higher levels, but in practice many levels may be active at the same time - and many people have no doubt died as they've focused on higher level needs to the exclusion of more urgent lower level ones!
With Halo, our virtual human test-bed we have a basic model of the hierarchy of needs embedded within the bot. Some elements (such as food) are artificially introduced into the VH (so she make's breakfast even though here avatar doesn't need it), some are new (having access to power and processing cycles), and some can be brought across as-is (socialising etc). Even with a basic model Halo began to follow a diurnal cycle that mirrored typical human activity, but with an element of unpredictability.
Andriamasinoro (2004) describes how Maslow’s hierarchy can be used to provide motivation for a hybrid artificial agent, and a similar model is implemented in the FAtiMA-PSI architecture described in Chapter 6.
We consider motivation to also include the higher level, more strategic goals, and to identify short terms goals that can then be passed on to a Decision Making, Problem-solving and Reasoning function to deal with.
- Up to Back to Mind
- On to Problem Solving