I'd like to talk about superstition.
No, not that Superstition (although it's exceptionally cool). I mean the process of associating an action with an observed effect when there's no real causal connection between them.
Humans (some humans, anyway) do this all the time. We avoid walking under ladders or opening umbrellas inside a house or letting a black cat cross our path (to avoid bad luck); we pick up a four-leafed clover or a penny (to gain good luck); and if we're sports figures, we spit, rub ourselves, turn in circles, and perform all kinds of contortions and twitches out of the belief that these actions can change events in the world with which they are completely unconnected.
The reason why I'm wondering about this is because it occurred to me today that NPCs in LT -- if I've understood what I've read -- are going to have three very interesting capabilities:
1. NPCs can form plans to achieve goals. These plans are representations of beliefs about how the NPC's actions can produce specific desired changes in the world.
2. NPCs can perceive effects that occur in their world. These perceptions are new information about the world added to what the NPC currently believes to be true.
3. NPCs can modify their plans based on goal-seeking logic that takes into account world-effects that they've perceived. This creates a feedback loop of action, observation, thinking, and reaction.
Where superstition comes into play is when it is possible for an NPC to take an action, to perceive some world-effect that is in fact completely unrelated to the action they just took, and to mistakenly correlate the action and effect so that they change their plans -- and then their future actions -- based on that false correlation. At that point, the NPC is behaving superstitiously.
So if NPCs in Limit Theory have the same basic kind of action/effect/perception/assessment/re-planning/reaction loop that humans have, it's possible that they could form superstitious beliefs as humans do.
Suppose an NPC who focuses on trading leaves a space station. For whatever reason, he takes an action to spin his ship in a circle. This just happens to be followed immediately by the arrival of a merchant ship that's full of cargo they want to sell at a discount.
If that NPC can know they took an action (spin in a circle), and that a merchant ship arrived immediately after their action (allowing that NPC to satisfy his goal of making good trades), can that NPC ever reason that spinning in a circle causes well-stocked merchant ships to appear, and get into the habit of spinning in a circle every time he leaves a station to try to cause a merchant ship to appear?
If so, is that awesome? Or horrifying? And that's just one contrived example -- imagine if you can all the possible superstitious behaviors that might emerge in an LT universe where NPCs can observe and plan.
Some questions about this notion:
1. How many times does an action/effect pair have to happen before an NPC decides there's a real correlation between them? Once would allow a lot of superstitious behavior to emerge; five times would be a very suspicious universe in which NPCs take quite a long time to accept that one behavior is better than another. Assuming NPCs count action/effect pairs at all, should the trigger number be fixed for all NPCs? Different for NPCs based on their personality? Different based on the importance (including survival importance) of the action/effect belief?
2. The flip side of the previous question: how many times should a superstitious belief not work before an NPC changes his mind, decides there's no real correlation there, and stops performing that action? Should that depend on the NPC's personality, so that some NPCs keep any superstition they've adopted?
3. What is the scope of what NPCs can observe about the world? Can they only see direct consequences of their own actions, which would mean that the "causal connection" concept they form between their action and the subsequent world-effect is always real and correct? If so, then how can NPCs ever express strategic behaviors, which require seeing patterns of cause and effect across large stretches of both space and time?
4. If superstitious behavior can emerge, should it be considered a programming fail state? In other words, if some NPCs occasionally take less-than-optimal actions because they've formed a superstitious belief, is that a bug that needs to be corrected? Or is it a glorious emergent effect that makes the world of the game more enjoyable?
Post
Thu Jan 30, 2014 1:19 am
#1
Very Superstitious
Last edited by Flatfingers on Thu Jan 30, 2014 3:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.