Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

As autonomous agents' interactions with humans become richer, w e believe it will become increasingly important for s o m e of the agents to have believable and engag- ing personalities. In previous papers w e have described Tok, a broad agent architecture which integrates reactiv- ity, goal-directed behavior, emotion and s o m e m e m o r y and inference for agents in non-real-time worlds. In this paper w e discuss the issues raised w h e n w e extend Tok to work in real-time, animated domains. Convincing animated motion poses three challenges to the architec- ture: multipleprimitiveactions and higher level activities must be executed simultaneously; future actions must be k n o w n before current actions complete, to enable smooth animation; and the mind must be fast enough to provide the impression of awareness. Here w e describe Hap, the reactive substrate of Tok, and its approaches to these challenges. T h e described architecture was used for the creation of three agents, called woggles, in a world titled Edge of Intention, which was firstshown at the A A A I - 9 2 Al-based Arts Exhibition.