Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Simulating Other People's Minds

I think I've figured out the secret to acting, at least in the sense of character philosophy. (Emotions are hard to simulate, especially if you don't have a lot of them.) Basically, you can act as or predict the actions of somebody if you can understand two things: philosophical postulates and the logic engine.

Philosophical postulates are things we hold to be the basics of how the world works. They are generally moral ideals or balances, like "some lives are more important than others." Different postulates will obviously produce a different person.

The logic engine is what takes the postulates, considers the current state, and makes a decision. Though I would love to use my own logic core, which I believe is very logical should be usable to compute from any set of postulates, some people allow emotions or "heat of the moment" to override the general postulates. This is distinct from those postulates because people starting with the same postulate set but different logic engines may factor physical state into different areas of computation.

I believe this technique is very useful both for actors and people who want to predict the actions of others. It shouldn't require psychoanalysis, but you may want to talk to the person you're trying to simulate first, for better results. Of course, if you have a record of that person's past decisions, make sure your interpretation of these components produces decisions consistent with what actually happened.

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