quote:Original post by Magmai Kai Holmlor
I was thinking along the lines of brownian motion, it could be useful to simulate nano-machines. So unless you're injecting the player into a neo-modern Tron, it's not really useful for a game.

Brownian motion has the statistics given by the Weiner process (which is a specialised form of a diffusion process). You can write the process model as an Ito Stochastic Differential Equation and instantiate paths through the state space using this process model - giving Brownian motion for your object. This is inherentaly a probabilistic model of motion where there exists some underlying stochastic forcing term driving the randomness. These ideas can be extended to more complex process models. I'm not going to go into more detail as it is far beyond the scope of this forum. Essentially though, you can write down a process model to describe the motion of your object through its state space.

The statistics of these processes can then be utilised in very interesting ways, especially to make decisions based on the likelihood of states at various times. Last year I published a paper showing the underlying mathematical connection between diffusion processes (which include the Weiner process) and Dynamic Bayesian Networks. The DBNs are a nice framework for working with probability distributions, especially if they are extended to Decision Networks. The diffusion process, stochastic DE and DBN are all inherantly related and this relationship can be exploited in very interesting ways.

So, I think it is a little erroneous to suggest that randomness and uncertainty cannot be utilised in games. It simply takes a little imagination to think of a context within which uncertainty would be entertaining!

Regards,

Timkin

Edited by - Timkin on October 16, 2001 3:55:02 AM