Emergence of Autonomous Behaviors of Virtual Characters through Simulated Reproduction

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of autonomous behaviors of virtual characters. We postulate that a behavior is regarded as autonomous when the actions performed by the agent re-sult from the interaction between its internal dynamics and the environment, rather than being externally controlled. In this work, we argue that an autonomous behavior is an agent’s solution to a given problem, which is obtained through a pro-cess of self-organization of the dynamics of a system that is composed of the agent’s controller, its body and the en-vironment. That process allows the emergence of complex behaviors without any description of actions or objectives. We show a technique capable of adapting an artificial neu-ral network to consistently control virtual Khepera-like robots by means of simulated reproduction, with no measure of the robots ’ fitness. All the robots are either male or female, and they are capable of evolving different kinds of behaviors ac-cording to their own characteristics, guided solely by the en-vironment’s dynamics.