quote:Original post by SFA
Hi.
I've just started my Ph.D in Computer Science (specifically the fields of graphics and AI), and after researching for going on 4 months now I've narrowed the focus of my research to have a long term goal of being able to reproduce stone age behavior in software (i.e before the advent of language to communicate).
I am assuming that you want to animate this behavior? Is this correct?
quote:
My supervisor (himself a doctor in AI) has advised me to be very ambitious and try to eventually create an 'Intelligent' Agent in a virtual environment that has the 'strong' agent qualities of rationality, learning, goal-orientedness etc.
In his own words :
i.e. the goal is to develop an I.A. that "thinks about" and reacts to its environment similar to humans. Then how does changing
that environment change its behaviour? i.e. you could have it
require food, clothing and shelter etc
This is good. I've been working on something like this for my game for some time from the design standpoint, not the AI POV, however, I have been thinking about these character's behaviors for some time.
quote:
Now I've been reading a lot into emergent behavior, genetic algorithms, neural nets, fuzzy logic and so forth - but my main problem is that I can't decide which style of AI representation(s) I should focus on first. Perhaps none of the above could really be used to develop so called 'strong' agent qualities...or perhaps using them in conjunction could yield better results?
I was just wondering if you guys had any comments, suggestions or recommendations for me as I start out on the long journey towards being a doctor! 
Any help would be great.
Cheers,
SFA.
Well, I am not a programmer or much versed in AI topics, but I have a good handle on primitivistic behaviors in modeling interactions these kinds of primitives would have with my avatar/player.
The first behavior I designed for my early humans interaction was with the most fundamental purposes of life itself, survival, so they had constant use of, and continuing articulation with, the sense of smell and sight, to smell or see if anything beneficial or harmful was present or approaching or leaving or paralleling, and this was conjunctive with the flight or fight instinct. They knew if they were downwind, that keeping a low profile would be helpful, and that making sound was a boo-boo so they kept still but alert. Think of men on the battle line and you get the picture.
Since the behavior for survivalistic mentalities is both perceptula in the senses (sight, hearing and smell) and physical (poised to fight or flee, yet, ears forward and nose high for optimal detection, simlutaneous with body hair positioned in the crosswind to detect changes in thermal mass and wind speed/direction due to another proximal physical mass {either the predator or the prey, or another of it's kind not part of the family unit already nearby and in the same position}).
In addition, the defensible location or exposed position is going to effect the degree of alarm in the sensory/physical response, and, the number of other primitives in the party, whether hunters or women, children or elderly, is all going to play into the individual response.
It is tribal as well as individual, so I would think it best to start with fight or flight, detect or be detected, hunt, reconnoiter or threat detection behaviors.
These will all rise or fall, change individually based on the collective environment, are we in a defensible area? Are we exposed in the open, is it half and half, are we a group of males armed and hunting, or a migrating pack or collective packs forming an entire tribe? What age are we in? Extremely primitive, where learned behaviors about predator/friendly/indifferent life form types are new experiences not yet generationally passed effectively or are we late stone age, where we walk taller with skins of pride on our backs because of inherited, learned or discovered skills are slowly making us master of the planet and we gnosis this?
So the quadrangle you are going to want to think about is: what level of sentience/development pysiologically and socially, what environmental familiarity or not, what physical characteristics of the individual (old, young, dominant alpha prime male) and what comprises the immediate proximal societal profile (a hunter alone behaves far different from a party of mixed humans migrating or feeding). Behaviors are going to spawn or emerge from these primary influences. The games we played then were learning tools for challenges to come, like they have always been. This is also true in the animal kingdom to a reasonable extent. The young play practicing fighting for their mature years and rites/priviledges.
In studying this to find engaging and fun ways I could make interaction for a modern consciousness (the user behind the avatars interaction) and the primitivistic NPC AI, I found myself observing human packs in the outdoors from an objective distance. Places like parks on weekends, outdoor backyard gatherings (I found that indoors and collective things like sports events were too socialized to let the primitivistic behaviors we all have so deep inside us to emerge with validity, there was always some sort of mental control going on that spoiled the sample, as it were.)
What I found was that more naturalistically designed playgrounds, with children and mothers, were good places to observe these survially oriented detection and tribal life skill teaching management behaviors, and, I also remarkably discovered that females do this all the time in great sophistication and subtlety. Males will just puff out the chest and stomp around mostly, basically because their tribal behavior is pretty simply defined; protect, provide and inseminate, so the scope is not wide, yet it is detectable, quantifiable and catalogable. Yes, I'm a writer and I bend words alla da time.
So watch the females, they practice this everywhere. Especially when not with the children and when there are men around, not in a gathering, but in a transitory place like a supermarket or bus/rail station. The female is constantly under threat assessment because of men nd their motives.
Were you aware that the first eighteen non verbal communications between a man and a woman were all designed so that the female can determine whether the man is a threat or not? This flies right in the face of the smooth talker theory more than you would think. They possess myriad, subtle and powerful behavioral indications that go back for as long as females have been persued, which in this case, is as far back as reproduction goes, which we can safely say is somewhere on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years old. Thus, it is some impressive bag of tricks, from elusion to evasion to confrontation. Just wait until you see a woman back a man off without anything but body position. Even a hulking dolt gets the message.
Study it long enough, and you will pick up some tricks of body language that will improve your love life in most interesting and rapid ways.
Please let me know how this is going, because I have great use for this in one of my adventure game aspects.
HTH,
Adventuredesign
[edited by - adventuredesign on February 2, 2004 4:58:29 AM]
