The Synthetic Characters group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Dr Bruce Blumberg, contributed research and development toward an extensible architecture for the brains of virtual creatures.
In 2026, I’m building brains for synthetic characters again. Same question as 1999: what makes a creature feel present, what gives ‘the illusion of life’, and how does that enrich the interaction (and outcomes)?
I was a graduate student in Dr Blumberg’s group from 1999-2001. Key influences of the group’s work included Dr Rodney Brooks (founder of iRobot), Dr Marvin Minsky (artificial intelligence pioneer), and Dr Randy Gallistel (eminent ethologist – the study of animal behaviour).
MIT Graduate Thesis
My thesis, “It’s about Time: Temporal Representations for Synthetic Characters,” contributed a new ethologically-inspired model for predictive learning in lifelike virtual creatures.
A summary of the key contributions from the thesis was published in the proceedings from the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) in 2002.
“Waiting for Goatzilla,” the tongue-in-cheek video that accompanied my thesis, is now on YouTube.
Twenty-five years later…
My thesis was about how a virtual terrier could represent time: how remembering the past and predicting the future is a big part of what makes a creature feel present, like somebody’s home in there.
In 2026, I’m building brains for synthetic characters again. Ziggy, our family’s AI, runs a five-layer memory architecture, and one of those layers is temporal. Tom, my photography partner, is learning my taste the way Duncan learned his trainer’s intent: from demonstrated behaviour, not instructions. The tools are unrecognizably better than what we had in 1999. The questions are the same ones Bruce taught us to ask: what is the context, how does it remember, how does it expect and predict, and what does it mean to “do the right thing” next?
The new work is documented as it happens over in Side Quests, and the whole path is in The Story To Date.
Goatzilla remains at large.