This book for the first time presents not only technical aspects of social multi-user shared collaborative virtual environments (virtual societies) enhanced with autonomous personal agents but also extensive experimental data on a vast number of users and analysis of their activities along with detailed statistics on their activities and user questionnaires which gauge user's perceived value of their experiences. This book leads from a presentation of technical aspects of a multi-user shared collaborative virtual environment and a way of constructing a virtual society using the environment and its multi-user application programming models, to a lot of useful statistical information, results about the virtual society populated by thousands of people based upon a design policy on the internet, and a future of a virtual society (self-sustaining virtual societies).

Book Contents

The first chapter of the book, written in a nontechnical way, brings in the phenomenology provided by the logical paradoxes, game theory, decision theory, dialectic reasoning, and literature, in order to plead in favour of the relative character of the logic used by intelligent human beings. The next three chapters deal with the mathematical formalism of the two-valued relative logic, the multi-valued relative logic, and the stochastic logic. The presentation is self-contained and the reader is supposed to have only basic knowledge about classical logic, naive set theory, and elementary probability theory. The last chapter contains applications to pattern-recognition and decision process.

There is no book dealing with the mathematical formalism of this type of logic published thus far. The potential readers are people interested in nonclassic logics, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and knowledge-based systems.  

About the Author

Dr Kouichi Matsuda received B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan and Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He has worked as a researcher in NEC Corporation, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc., and Sony Corporation. His research interests include HCI, Interface Agent, Al, CSCW, network services and entertainment services. He co-designed VRML97. He is the author of five books and 25 research papers on topics from HCI, Window System and Virtual Society. Dr Matsuda is a member of ACM, IPSJ (Japan) and IEICE (Japan).