[MUD-Dev] Goal orienetd NPCs

[Nathan Yospe]

On Wed, 28 May 1997, Jeff Kesselman wrote:

:At 09:00 AM 5/28/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:
:
:Heh, yep. :)
:
:I designed soemthing alogn the same lines.  I staredt with as gedanken
:experimient of a shop keeper though I suspect alot of it coudl be
:generalized.. basicly ist a black board algorithym, witha  list of
:"motivatoras" each of which examines something about the tarnsaction and
:posts a positive or negatoive value back. total reactio nto the propsoed
:transactio nis asum of all of these "motivators" responses.

Hmm. These add an element of instinctive response. I don't like blackboard
algorithms... I prefer weighted nets or scaled axis algorithms, as they
tend to have more of a realistic feel... but the concept is interesting.

:I took it a stp furtehr and added something that you didn't mention, memory
:and bias.  Ina  simple sense, neural nets are sterotype engines, they
:basicly tell you "this never before seen set of inpuits looks MOSt like
:thes existing sets of inputs.."  So I calculated a final mood at the end of
:all transactiosn and back-propegated that i na net where the inpust were
:visibly ascertainable chgaracteristics of the charaxcter (height, weight,
:sex, hair color, value of clothes, etc....)  Thsi cna be pre-baised by
:pre-trtainign the net.  The net is used when a transactio nbegins to get an
:initial "reaction" value to the customer.

I have been tweaking around with my memory net, which is starting to
influence parts of my skill net, but I have yet to apply it to social
behavior outside of interpretation of the natural language parser. This
might be an interesting three week delay to project completion...

:The communciation point of yours turns otu ot be the hardest, im still
:thingk abotu hwo to give lues in a reasponse by the NPC that shows which
:motivators were most strongly invovled in teh decision and stoill lookign
:like reasonable english...

You mean unlike your posts? (Methinks either a spellchecker, or slightly
slower typing is in order... I could barely read this, and that mainly
because I am a speedreader.)

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Nathan F. Yospe - University of Hawaii Dept of Physics - yospe at hawaii.edu