Everyday Believability

Believable Agents must be able to handle a large number of goals, opportunistically acting on them while maintaining a focus of purpose. They also must be able to operate over long life times without signiicant performance degradations. We describe in this paper a method of managing an agent's goals so that the agent can make progress on as many goals as possible, without spending undue time considering goals that it can't make progress on. The key part of this method is a way of specializing and generalizing the set of perceptual cues that are used to bring a goal into consideration by the agent. The method is described via a simple example. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the oocial policies or endorsements, either express or implied, of Martin Marietta or the United States Government.