[MUD-Dev] FEAR Animat style AI for Quake 2

[Sasha Hart]

[Ted L. Chen]

> At a simple level, the stimuli-response of 'animat' can easily be
> tricked, and actually produce funny results because they have no
> overriding executive.  For example, assume we have a threat
> detection organ that tells the rest of the brain that someone is
> attacking when they have a rifle pointed towards us.  What happens
> when the guy with the rifle turns rapidly toward and away from us?

That's not a problem with S-R, that's a problem with "when they have
a rifle pointed towards us." Change the conditional to something
sane and you solve the problem. For example, if the animat
habituates to rifle-pointing, it has effectively established a new
conditional - "if a rifle is pointed towards us AND he didn't just
do it 3 times, be very afraid."

I'm somewhat interested as to what the executive would do here.

> P.S. I don't haven't anything against animats.  I'm just wary of
> their hyped application towards human-like decision making.
> There's a reason why it's animat and not humat ;)

The hype starts with the assumption that we know how animals work.
Watch a rat at purposeful work and you might agree that the
comparison across species seems pretty trivial in light of our
nearly complete lack of understanding of either. Many of my
psychologist friends don't agree, but I'd like to see them work
through basic AI tasks - feeling satisfied that you have explained
something is very different from understanding it precisely and
comprehensively.

Sasha



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