Scientists are working on an advanced form of artificial intelligence which they claim could produce thinking computer game charaters. John Von Radowitz reports.

It sounds like a brilliant new film plot for Steven Spielberg. Techno wizards dream up a computer game so sophisticated that its characters, including the ''baddies'', develop wills of their own.

But now a professor of mathematics at King's College, London, is growing an advanced form of artificial intelligence which he believes will produce thinking computer game characters.

Professor John Taylor says his progeny will be able to speak, build memories, learn weaknesses and respond emotionally to events in the game.

Not one to make modest claims, he predicts his characters will become conscious. And it's more than just a game - it's the first step towards a paradigm shift in the world of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Other researchers are sceptical, to put it mildly. But Prof Taylor insists he is on to something. He believes consciousness arises in the brain's frontal lobes - the area in which humans process language and emotion. Simulate this processing, and consciousness will spontaneously emerge, he claims.

The professor calls his ''mind'' the Language Acquisition Device, or LAD, and last year he co-founded Lobal Technologies to market it to games developers.

At present LAD has the linguistic abilities of an 18-month-old child. But it is learning and growing. By the end of the year, Prof Taylor hopes LAD will have developed the abilities of a six-year-old and contain 10,000 artificial neurons.

Eventually, he hopes, it will become self-aware. ''It doesn't have consciousness at this point,'' said Prof Taylor. ''But two or three years down the line I would say it will.''

Prof Taylor is not the first to have brought artificial intelligence to computer games.

In 1992, Steve Grand, a self-taught programmer, designed the first AI game. Borrowing ideas from neural networks, genetics and chemistry, he produced a virtual pet called a ''norn''. Norns combined computational structures similar to the neurons, enzymes, receptors and genes in real biology.

When the game was marketed as ''Creatures'' in 1996 it was a huge hit, and many players formed strong emotional ties with their norns.

But the idea of imitating biological systems to develop computer game AI failed to take off, largely because it is such an intensive task and the results do not always go as planned.

So the ''intelligent'' characters in modern computer games are mostly programmed by scripted tricks. Sometimes the characters appear to have minds of their own, but it's an illusion. Everything is pre-ordained in lines of carefully crafted code.

A good example is a game called The Sims in which characters go about their daily lives having relationships, eating, sleeping and so on.

Players can press a button marked ''free will'' to let the characters do their own thing. But there's no free will involved - the Sims have been prorammed to satisfy a set of desires.

Still, Prof Taylor is convinced he is producing something revolutionary and he is already pondering the moral questions that emerge when dealing with a conscious character, however virtual.

''I can imagine ethical issues arising around whether it is right to switch LAD off,'' he says