Virtual Humans as Centaurs
William Swartout, PhD
USC Institute for Creative Technologies
swartout@ict.usc.edu
In computer science, centaur has come to refer to human-computer teams that collaborate on tasks and can often out-perform either humans or computers alone. This approach has been used successfully in domains such as chess(Cassidy, 2015) and protein-folding with the FoldIt system(Khatib et al., 2011). In the teamed view of centaur, both humans and computers remain distinct, but join together to solve problems. However, if we go back to Greek mythology, a centaur is not a team, but rather a distinct and unique entity that is a hybrid of a man and a horse, blending characteristics of both. If we think of things from that perspective, then we could broaden the notion of centaur in computer science to not only concern the nature of human-computer teams, but also confront what it might be like to create hybrid entities that combine aspects of both people and computers.