Development of Extemporaneous Performance by Synthetic Actors in the Rehearsal Process

Autonomous synthetic actors must invent variations of known material in order to perform given only a limited script, and to assist the director with development of the performance. In addition, the synthetic actors need to learn through the rehearsal process, as their human counterparts do, via feedback from the director. Through the production of two performances, involving both human and synthetic actors, a variety of methods of creating extemporaneous performance and utilising feedback to select the most effective performance variations will be examined. One method of varying the performance is the manner in which lines of dialogue are delivered. The paper outlines use of a statistical technique to create three variations of a performance; each variation was then ranked, and these rankings used to weight the variances in individual lines to create a superior variation. This allowed quick evaluation of many lines, without having to score each individual line.