290 16 AGI Preschool and set it loose in the everyday human world; but of course, this isn’t feasible given the current state of development of robotics technology. So one must seek approximations. Toward this end we have embodied OpenCogPrime in non-player characters in video game style virtual worlds, and carried out preliminary experiments embodying OpenCogPrime in humanoid robots. These are reasonably good options but they have limitations and lead to subtle choices: what kind of game characters and game worlds, what kind of robot environments, etc.? One conclusion we have come to, based largely on the considerations in Chapter 11 on development and Chapter 9 on the importance of environment, is that it may make sense to embed early-stage proto-AGI and AGI systems in environments reminiscent of those used for teaching young human children. In this chapter we will explore this approach in some detail: emulation, in either physical reality or an multiuser online virtual world, of an environment similar to preschools used in early human childhood education. Complete specification of an “AGI Preschool” would require much more than a brief chapter; our goal here is to sketch the idea in broad outline, and give a few examples of the types of opportunities such an environment would afford for instruction, spontaneous learning and formal and informal evaluation of certain sorts of early-stage AGI systems. The material in this chapter will pop up fairly often later in the book. The AGI Preschool context will serve, throughout the following chapters, as a source of concrete examples of the various algorithms and structures. But it’s not proposed merely as an expository tool; we are making the very serious proposal that sending AGI systems to a virtual or robotic preschool is an excellent way — perhaps the best way — to foster the development of human-level human-like AGI. 16.1.1 Contrast to Standard AI Evaluation Methodologies The reader steeped in the current AI lite