Abstract

G. H. Hardy (1941) argues that the sole criterion for excellent research is that the researcher produces “beauty. ” While seemingly ineffable and frustratingly imprecise, Hardy instead suggests that creating beauty is straightforward. First, the work must be accurate: erroneous results are useless. Second, one’s peers must recognize the work to be interesting, exciting, elegant, and “cool. ” While this second criterion might seem arbitrary, there is generally good agreement between scholars in a given community about “interesting ” work (see Cole and Cole 1973 for a discussion), so one need not survey numerous researchers to ensure research is beautiful; asking a couple is equivalent to asking them all. With certain caveats, the work in embodied conversational agents (ECA) can make claims to beauty. ECAs are phenomenologically “accurate ” to the extent that the agent’s outward appearance objectively matches the appearance, language, attitudes and behavior of humans. Thus, questions that address manifestation accuracy include “Does the agent walk like a person walk? ” and “Does the agent use language and make grammatical errors the same way a person does?”

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