[MUD-Dev] Goal orienetd NPCs

[Jeff Kesselman]

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.

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.

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...

JK