Constructing an animat mind using 505 sub-minds from 234 different authors

The World-Wide-Mind (WWM) is a scheme for putting minds (by which we mean the software to drive a real or virtual agent) online for remote re-use by third parties. Although the animat community favours the extension of existing agent minds in an ongoing process, there is currently no easy way to re-use minds built by other authors. If re-use became the norm, it is suggested that larger, more diverse and more complex minds could be built. This paper describes an ongoing project that uses WWM technology to develop a novel set of minds that incorporate a range of algorithms and techniques. We demonstrate that it is possible to evolve superior minds by the artificial selection and combination of existing online minds. The project that is described here involved 234 authors who developed 505 different minds for the virtual animal in a re-implementation of Tyrrell’s Simulated Environment (Tyrrell, 1993). These minds, which were developed by two classes of undergraduate Computer Science students, were subsequently selected based on their performance in the virtual world, and integrated into larger minds. At the time of writing the most successful mind developed used as components the two sub-minds that most successfully satisfied the animal’s two main goals. Since a huge number of combinations of minds is possible, it is important that the work is distributed among a community of researchers. The architecture of the World-Wide-Mind makes this possible.