302 16 AGI Preschool
solution to this issue: a novel class of virtual worlds called BlocksNBeadsWorld, consisting of the following aspects:
1. 3D blocks of various shapes and sizes and frictional coefficients, that can be stacked
2. Adhesive that can be used to stick blocks together, and that comes in two types, one of which can be removed by an adhesive-removing substance, one of which cannot (though its bonds can be broken via sufficient application of force)
3. Spherical beads, each of which has intrinsic unchangeable adhesion properties defined ac- cording to a particular, simple “adhesion logic”
4, Each block, and each bead, may be associated with multidimensional quantities representing its taste and smell; and may be associated with a set of sounds that are made when it is impacted with various forces at various positions on its surface
Interaction between blocks and beads is to be calculated according to standard Newtonian physics, which would be compute-intensive in the case of a large number of beads, but tractable using distributed processing. For instance if 10K beads were used to cover a humanoid agent’s face, this would provide a fairly wide diversity of facial expressions; and if 10K beads were used to form a blanket laid on a bed, this would provide a significant amount of flexibility in terms of rippling, folding and so forth. Yet, this order of magnitude of interactions is very small compared to what is done in contemporary simulations of fluid dynamics or, say, quantum chromodynamics.
One key aspect of the spherical beads is that they can be used to create a variety of rigid or flexible surfaces, which may exist on their own or be attached to blocks-based constructs. The specific inter-bead adhesion properties of the beads could be defined in various ways, and will surely need to be refined via experimentation, but a simple scheme that seems to make sense is as follows.
Each bead can have its surface tesselated into hexagons (the number of these can be tuned), and within each hexagon it can have two different adhesion coefficients: one for adhesion to other beads, and one for adhesion to blocks. The adhesion between two beads along a certain hexagon is then determined by their two adhesion coefficients; and the adhesion between a bead and a block is determined by the adhesion coefficient of the bead, and the adhesion coefficient of the adhesive applied to the block. A distinction must be drawn between rigid and flexible adhesion: rigid adhesion sticks a bead to something in a way that can’t be removed except via breaking it off; whereas flexible adhesion just keeps a bead very close to the thing it’s stuck onto. Any two entities may be stuck together either rigidly or flexibly. Sets of beads with flexible adhesion to each other can be used to make entities like strings, blankets or clothes.
Using the above adhesion logic, it seems one could build a wide variety of flexible structures using beads, such as (to give a very partial list):
1. fabrics with various textures, that can be draped over blocks structures,
2. multilayered coatings to be attached to blocks structures, serving (among many other ex-
amples) as facial expressions
3. liquid-type substances with varying viscosities, that can be poured between different con- tainers, spilled, spread, etc.
4, strings tyable in knots; rubber bands that can be stretched; etc.
Of course there are various additional features one could add. For instance one could add a special set of rules for vibrating strings, allowing BlocksNBeadsWorld to incorporate the creation
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