Behavioral self-organization in lifelike synthetic agents

Modern computer graphics technology has enjoyed rapid development in recent years, attracting researchers and practitioners to explore a wide spectrum of applications ranging from computer-aided graphical design to artificial life and virtual reality. This paper is concerned with the animation-based entertainment use of computer graphics, i.e., to create digitally synthetic agents that can self-animate themselves, adapt to their virtual environments, and learn new behaviors to attain some specific goals. Here we propose a synthetic agent computational architecture called inter-threaded motif-based behavioral self-organization architecture, in which one motif acquires a conditioned association from the presently sensed state of the environment to the requirement of a desired motion as well as a plausible behavioral pattern to enable such a motion, whereas another computes the optimal parameters for the identified behavior in fulfilling the motion requirement. This architecture will enable animated behaviors to be automatically programmed based on the concurrent self-organization of individual motifs as well as their crisscrossing interactions.