Copyright (c) 2011 IEEE. Personal use is permitted. For any other purposes, permission must be obtained from the IEEE by emailing pubs-permissions@ieee.org. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. 1 A Neurally-controlled Computer Game Avatar with Human-like Behaviour David Gamez, Zafeirios Fountas, Member, IEEE, Andreas K. Fidjeland, Member, IEEE Abstract This paper describes the NeuroBot system, which uses a global workspace architecture implemented in spiking neurons to control an avatar within the Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2004) computer game. This system is designed to display human-like behaviour within UT2004, which provides a good environment for comparing human and embodied AI behaviour without the cost and difficulty of full humanoid robots. Using a biologically-inspired approach, the architecture is loosely based on theories about the high-level control circuits in the brain, and it is the first neural implementation of a global workspace that has been embodied in a complex dynamic real-time environment. NeuroBot’s human-like behaviour was tested by competing in the 2011 BotPrize competition, in which human judges play UT2004 and rate the humanness of other avatars that are controlled by a human or bot. NeuroBot came a close second, achieving a humanness rating of 36%, while the most human human reached 67%. We also developed a humanness metric that combines a number of statistical measures of an avatar’s behaviour into a single number. In our experiments with this metric NeuroBot was rated as 33% human and the most human human achieved 73%. Index Terms Spiking neural networks, Global workspace, Botprize, Turing test, Computer game, Benchmarking, Competitions, Eval- uation, Neural networks, Serious Games I. I NTRODUCTION I N 1950 Turing [1] proposed that an imitation game could be used to answer the question whether a machine can think. In this game a human judge engages in conversation with a human and a machine and tries to identify the human. The conversation is conducted over a text-only channel, such as a computer console interface, to ensure that the voice or body of the machine does not influence the judge’s decision. While Turing posed his original test as a way of answering the question whether machines can think, it is now more typically seen as a way of evaluating the extent to which machines have achieved human-level intelligence. Since the Turing Test was proposed, there has been a substantial amount of work on programs (chatterbots) that attempt to pass the test by imitating the conversational behaviour of humans. Many of these compete in the annual Loebner Prize competition [2]. None of these programs have passed the Turing Test so far, and they often rely on conversational tricks for their apparent realism — for example, parrying the interlocutor with a question when they cannot process or understand the input [3]. D. Gamez, Z. Fountas, and A.K. Fidjeland are with Imperial College London. This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/F033516/1.