Magical A-Life Avatars

Author: Peter Small

Published November 1998 by Manning Publications

ISBN 1884777589

A new paradigm for the Internet

Magical A-Life Avatars takes the reader on an intellectual adventure as it explores new ways to look at the Internet and the World Wide Web. It is for designers and programmers who feel limited by conventional concepts.

Making full use of object oriented concepts and employing ideas and methods taken from biological and artificial life systems, Magical A-Life Avatars approaches the design of products and services for the Internet and the World Wide Web from a radically different perspective.

All concepts are painlessly introduced by making extensive use of diagrams rather than technical jargon. The book demonstrates with simple examples how to make use of multimedia run time engines to create avatars, intelligent agents and sophisticated Intranets. The book details the design of brain like mechanisms that can be used to incorporate smart behavior into Intranets and Web agents.

Describing new ways to approach game design, educational systems, information distribution and retrieval, Magical A-Life Avatars has a futuristic feel, yet it is eminently practical for here-and-now applications.

Included, is a thought provoking section which abstracts the essence of biological life in terms of information theory to show how it merges seamlessly with the Internet