"The virtual world provides the body," said Dr Ben Goertzel, founder and head of Novamente.
"We have a pretty fully functioning animal brain right now and we are hooking it up to the different virtual worlds,"
On the research side, said Dr Goertzel, virtual worlds also solved the problem of giving an AI a relatively unsophisticated environment in which it could live and learn.
"I'd really like to do virtual talking parrots," he said, "and then virtual babies.
