[MUD-Dev] Mob AI

[Martin Keegan]

>   One idea I had for AI was to have a "Reaction system" for pc's and npc's
> alike, that when certain conditions were met, the system sent a short

Island had mobiles which were capable of answering simple questions. The
NL parser knew a teensy bit of English grammar, which it converted into
Dogoy, an internal language which was English with the verbs replaced by
numbers (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc) and slashes.

The mobiles could respond to utterances like:

'go away'
'what is your strength?'
'who am I?'
'who are you?'
'what is an acorn?'
'where are you?'
'do you like me?'
'who do you like?'

One celebrated feature of this was that "what are you afraid of?" came out
as the Dogoy equivalent of 'what is an of?', and the mobile would state
the first object containing the word 'of'. Consequently, all talking
mobiles claimed to be afraid of the 'box of food' (briefly the bar of soap
when the objects were re-ordered alphabetically). The box of food was
taken out of its alphabetical position in the objects list to regain the
traditional behaviour. This became such a ridiculous in-joke that the box
of food was imbued with massive magical powers.

Not particularly impressive, but given that most muds don't have talking
mobiles (assuming they HAVE mobiles), no mean achievement.

Mk