Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Worlds – Toward Human-Level AI Agents

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a long tradition as a scientific field, with tremendous achievements accomplished in the decades behind us. At the same time, in the last few decades, we have witnessed a rising popularity of interactive computer games and multi-user virtual environments, resulting with millions of users inhabiting these virtual worlds. This paper deals with the intersection of AI and virtual worlds, focusing on AI agents and exploring the potential implications toward the human-level AI. It offers a unique multidisciplinary approach to the subject, in order to give a comprehensive view on the elaborated problems and the way they are interrelated. Benefits coming from this kind of broad study are twofold: on one hand, research on advanced AI agents in the virtual worlds is the necessary ingredient of their further evolution; and on the other hand, the virtual worlds represent an excellent platform for research on numerous problems related to the challenging field of AI.