SURVEY OF NON-BIOLOGICAL ENTITIES

Over the course of history, the greatest minds: scientists, philanthropists, educators, politicians, leaders, philosophers, were fascinated with the way human brain works. From Michelangelo to Lomonosov, from DaVinci to Einstein, there have been numerous attempts to uncover the mystery of human mind and to replicate its working first through simple mechanical devices an later, in the 20^th century, through computing machines, software and robots.

 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing posed the question “can machines think?” In order to establish credible criteria to answer this question, he proposed a test, now known as “The Turing Test”—to evaluate a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligence. At the core of the test is conversation in a natural language between the human judge and the opponent, who can be either human or a machine. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In the light of recent developments, it can be viewed as the ultimate multimodal behavioral biometric, which can detect differences between a man and the machine.

While automatic robot authentication or behavior analysis has not been closely investigated in literature, robot emotion recognition has been studies to some degree. In addition to experiments on understanding of emotional states of robots, some work has been started on general analysis of avatar behavior, such as the project on Avatar DNA. Together, the segments define the makeup of an avatar. The genes of the avatar are unique and include user biometric data, public key information, personal information, authentication information, creation data, etc. Verification modules in the virtual world collect information directly from the avatar to establish the roles and rights that should be granted to this user.

          There are three main types of non-biological entities that can be broadly classified as Virtual Beings (avatars), Intelligent Software Agents (bots), and Hardware Robots.

          According to a dictionary, the word “Avatar” means: “embodiment: a new personification of a familiar idea”; or the manifestation of a Hindu deity (especially Vishnu) in human or superhuman or animal form. In an on-line community, Avatar is a virtual representation of a player in an on-line world, a software creation that exists in virtual environment but is controlled by a human player from the physical world. A comprehensive summary of avatar types is given in an on-line book by John Suler. The book itself is not a typical publication – it exists only in the on-line form and evolves with time to reflect constant changes in virtual gaming communities. According to author of that book, the following types of avatars exist based.