Predicting how humans will behave

Posted by ljmacphee on September 17, 2007 under artificial intelligence in the news |

Could a computer predict your next move in a game of strategy based only on observations of your past behaviour? The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) certainly hopes so. It has funded a project led by computer scientist H. Van Dyke Parunak to explore the idea.

Artificial intelligence experts normally approach this problem by assuming that the inner state of a person (or an “agent” in AI parlance) can be described in terms of beliefs, desires and goals. Since these goals determine an agent’s actions, it should then to be possible to use this knowledge to make predictions about the agent’s future actions.

Parunak claims to have used these ideas with some success in making predictions about future behaviour. He says his simulation works in relatively complex environments, making predictions in real-time.

Stategy predicting software

Prediction of human behavior through simulations has been a busy topic of late. It was used, mostly unsuccessfully to predict how fighter pilots would react to stressful situations. It has been used in the corporate world to predict consumer behavior and more recently in creating game characters that are believable. Success so far has been limited.

More information:
Geosimulation: Modeling Crowd Behavior
US Patent Application
Action-Reaction Leaning: Analysis and Synthesis of Human Behavior ( simpler interactions are discussed in this thesis )
They Got Gameplay - Interactive Pretending: An Overview of Simulation (pdf)
Egress Reseach used after the Rhode Island fire to predict how and why crowds move as they do under duress.