Virtual baby created to help understand the human brain
Virtual toddler Baby X has been created by the Auckland Bioengineering Institute with the aim to recreate brain activity and model neural pathways.
The computer generated child will be able to mimic the neural behaviour of learning, while also being able to recognise symbols and get distracted, like a human child would.
Unveiled last year at a TedX talk, Baby X creates its own expressions and emotions, with real-life learning models, such as conditioning, repetition, and reinforcement learning being incorporated into its learning.
The researchers described Baby X as “an interactive animated virtual infant prototype.
"(It) is a computer generated psychobiological simulation under development in the Laboratory of Animate Technologies and is an experimental vehicle incorporating computational models of basic neural systems involved in interactive behaviour and learning."