Towards more human-like episodic memory for more human-like agents

Abstract

Episodic memory (EM) is an umbrella term for memory systems that operate with representations of personal history of an entity. The content of EM is related to particular places and moments, and connected to subjective feelings and current goals. Recently, it has been argued that EM is one of the key components contributing to believability of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), at least when agents interact with humans for more than a couple of minutes, because it allows the user to understand better the agent's history, personality, and internal state: both actual state and past state [e.g. 2, 5]. Technically, the EM is merely a data structure for loss compression of the flow of external events. The EM cannot be implemented as a pure log/video, because these are bad data structures (including human level). Why are they bad? First, they produce too large data. Second, they are not well organised with respect to future possible queries: neither a log nor a video have appropriate indexes in terms of database systems. A better approach is needed. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.