http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/e3-project-natals-molyneux-and-milo-interview?page=2
http://www.develop-online.net/features/557/About-a-Boy
take a look at these interviews. very good reads about milo.
“At Lionhead, we’ve always been fascinated by AI and using AI in gameplay. A lot of AI is academic research; funnelled down neural nets and learning – it’s very antiseptic, there’s no emotion behind it. It goes back further than Lionhead, back to Bullfrog, where we were playing around with these simulations of little people and their little minds. Emotional AI is not real AI; you couldn’t write a paper on it. It’s more about how you use weak learning to make people think there’s something going on there.”
Eurogamer: You said he only understands certain words. So presumably you can't have a conversation about the situation in Palestine?
Peter Molyneux: The number of words he understands is built up over time. For Claire [the lady who demoed a conversation with Milo during Microsoft's conference], it's something like 500 words.
But we haven't cracked the real problem, which is him understanding the meaning of it all. He'll give you the illusion he does that. The interesting thing is you can only talk to him when the Talk icon appears at the bottom of the screen. That's when he's listening to you; the rest of the time, he's not. He's listening to you because there's a context in which you can talk to him.
One of the journalists who came in before you had obviously read up on the Turing test. He asked Milo one of the questions in the test - 'Do you remember when we met yesterday?' Well, of course, we haven't cracked the Turing test. If we had, then applying it to a computer game would be the last of the solutions we'd use it for.
