Researchers Create Character With Reasoning Abilities Of A Child

This article was not as interesting to me as the test they used:

... To test "Eddie's" reasoning powers, the group created a demo in Second Life that subjected their theory to a false-belief test.

In a typical real-life version of this test, a child witnesses a series of events in which Person A places an object (such as a teddy bear) in a certain location (such as a cabinet). Person A then leaves the room, and during his absence Person B moves the object to a new location (such as the refrigerator). The child is then asked to predict where Person A will look for the object when he gets back.

The right answer, of course, is the cabinet, but children age 4 and under will generally say the refrigerator because they haven't yet formed a theory of the mind of others.

The researchers recreated the same situation in Second Life, using an automated theorem prover coupled with procedures for converting conversational English in Second Life into formal logic, the native language of the prover. - scidaily