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How superstitious should NPCs be?

Not at all -- NPCs doing dumb things would weaken the challenge of the game.
Total votes: 6 (8%)
A little bit -- it would help make the social world feel more plausible.
Total votes: 63 (81%)
Very superstitious -- it would be fun to see NPCs doing crazy things.
Total votes: 9 (12%)
Total votes: 78
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Re: Very Superstitious

#31
Zvanya wrote:I'd like a fourth poll option "All of the above, varying from place to place."
Local variation wasn't included as an option since the goal was to try to find out how people here feel about the prevalence of superstitious NPCs generally.

But it would be my preference as well.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#33
I do very much like this idea, since it has the potential to add quite a bit of personality to the AI. What I envision would be subtle things, like a miner always starting prospecting from the side facing the sun, or an escort pilot flying behind and to the right of his quarry. To use the spinning in circles example, it's hard for me to see what would cause an NPC to do that in the first place, when the trigger of "oh, these last couple of runs have been quiet, I should keep forming up on the starboard for good luck." seems more organic, to me.

And, at the risk of going beyond the scope of the thread, this has got me thinking about faction wide superstition as a base for military traditions arising, possibly stopping at the squadron level, or even being fleet-wide. So good idea. Real good idea.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#34
As Jain points out by example, superstitions live at a level of behavior more complex than simple numeric errors.

Heretical as this may seem, not everything is about economics. ;)

I understand the point about player perception. Behavior that's too complex looks random, which means boring gameplay since one tactic/strategy is as good as another.

Again, though, consider the options in the poll that started this thread. Only one option is a high frequency of correlating actions with consequences, where NPCs will indeed believe a lot of dumb things. The other options are for tighter reasoning, with at most only the occasional error of causal belief. That's hardly the same thing as being bad at math, and not likely to generate the same kinds of erroneous behaviors.

A behavior of deciding to buy or not buy something based on a math error is not in the same class as behaviors such as (and this is only one quick example) never shooting at a freighter because you shot at one once and it turned out to be an undercover police ship.

Not always reasoning perfectly does not mean appearing completely broken. A reasonable amount of mildly faulty reasoning could as easily lead players to say, "Hmm, that's unexpected but not completely bizarre... I wonder why he did that? Does he know something I should know?" and want to investigate.

I see that as making a game with complex NPCs more fun, not less fun.

But let's turn this around: how would you make NPCs rationally infallible, incapable of ever incorrectly linking something they do with an observed phenomenon that happens right after they act? Is that even possible?
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Re: Very Superstitious

#35
It's not all about economics but it is all about maths. Because it's a computer program.

I'm not against irrational behaviours - you may recall I started a thread about it.

I'm talking about how you would go about modelling "superstitious behaviour." It's a concept that seems overly vague, conflating too many fuzzy ideas, and assuming that NPCs are tiny elves who live in the computer rather than a collection of decision-making algorithms.

What biases do you want to see introduced into the decision-making process that you think would produce the results you want to see? And how would they impact other decisions the NPC would be expected to make?

If they overweight prior events, for example, that makes them very change-intolerant in general. Is that some reasoning error that could be introduced into the population? Perhaps. But trying to weight it accurately to produce "superstitions" without making them simply make bad choices is rather complicated.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#36
I don't think that superstitious behavior needs to be modeled as a reasoning error, instead it would be simpler to treat it as a preference. The two examples I wrote up earlier both are modeled and realized as physical relationships to other objects, which are then repeated as habit. At first, it dosn't require any artificially introduced reasoning errors at all, just a coincidence.

An example: NPC fighter pilot's AI determines that a decent patrol route is clockwise around the zone. All quiet. Since there's no reason for him not to change this behavior, he has a few more quiet patrols, now he perfers to patrol clockwise, out of superstition, or habit.

I do admit that I have a less then perfect understanding of exactly what the AI is capable of, I was under the impression that such reasoning wasn't completely out of scope. And superstition-like preferences could be a part of that.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#37
You're weighting a path on successful repetition if you do that. And if you do it too strongly, you just end up with NPCs going round in circles.

"Going clockwise" is hardly a complicated enough behaviour to count as a superstition though. In a system where the initial decision is basically random, all you'll get is some NPCs going clockwise and others going anticlockwise.

Of course the AIs making the decisions to do clockwise or anticlockwise won't be full-personality strong-AI types anyway. They'll be workers, not decision makers, so it won't apply to them.

I worry that, between this and Meyer's-Briggs, Traits and everything else, people seem to want to load up the poor NPC's decision trees with every kind of complexity they can. Once you start getting a hundred different variables in place, you stop being able to model any kind of behaviour accurately. You end up with an almost impossible amount of randomness and some very odd decisions - not to mention redundancy and overlap.

As I say, I am not at all against some irrationality. But we have to be realistic about what it is we're asking for from Josh here. We're not going to get emergent religions. If we want specific types of mistake, we have to be clear about exactly how those things are expected to be modelled within the confines of an efficient, functional, decision-making machine.

What you don't want is NPCs who spend their time shooting pointlessly at rocks or flying round in corkscrews because some decision path got overweighted and they can't be shaken out of it.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#38
Katawa wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:Question: Shouldn’t the fact that an NPC is superstitious depend on its personality? I mean yes a lot of people have stupid superstitions. But there are some like myself who have none, unless you count in my cynicism.
You are simply not aware of them.
Conditioning of which you are not aware is not the same as superstitions. In my experience people who are superstitious are aware of their superstitions and are keen to defend them if you are to confront them on it.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#39
McDuff wrote:
Hadrianus wrote: I mean yes a lot of people have stupid superstitions. But there are some like myself who have none, unless you count in my cynicism.
LOL.

"I have perfectly logical beliefs, you have some quirky ideas, he's a superstitious nut."

I invite you to consider the possibility that nobody actually considers themselves to be stupid and irrational, and weigh up the chances that you, alone of all born men, have attained the super-humanity required for you to be the first person to correctly analyse his own mind perfectly.
Also should not the incline towards superstition also be distributed unevenly, geographically speaking? On earth you see that the poorer and less educated a country becomes the more the population is inclined to believe all sort of nonsense.
I dunno, as a member of a first world nation myself and a fairly well travelled individual, belief in nonsense like "my country is the best country" or "people from other countries are to blame for my problems" or "there is such a thing as a free market" or "democracy leads inevitably to maximised freedom" seems to happen much more frequently at the top where people are rich and coddled than in poor countries where they don't have as much insulating wealth between themselves and the brutality of their ruling classes.

I suspect this is simply a case of you classifying the sort of errant nonsense we all take as read in the west as "sensible", which of course would make your statement axiomatically true. Proof you can do anything you like with the right axioms.
Well first of all I did not say that I am the first and only man to not be superstitious.
Second I was not aware that this thread was about me
Third I said more inclined towards superstition not more superstitious, those are two different things.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#41
ThymineC wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:Third I said more inclined towards superstition not more superstitious, those are two different things.
What's the practical difference?
The probability of people being superstitious is higher, but just because a phenomena has a higher probability of occurring does not mean that it will actually occur.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#42
Hadrianus wrote:
ThymineC wrote:
Hadrianus wrote:Third I said more inclined towards superstition not more superstitious, those are two different things.
What's the practical difference?
The probability of people being superstitious is higher, but just because a phenomena has a higher probability of occurring does not mean that it will actually occur.
We are talking about statistical significant amount of persons, in this context it becomes the same.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#44
I'm going to have to agree with Katawa on this one. As long as these 'superstitions' doesn't make it so that the AI looks like it's broken, I really don't care.
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Early Spring - 1055: Well, I made it to Boatmurdered, and my initial impressions can be set forth in three words: What. The. F*ck.
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Re: Very Superstitious

#45
Hadrianus wrote:We? Who is "we" ? Or are you using the "Royal we" to describes yourself?
He's talking about you. You said:
Hadrianus wrote:On earth you see that the poorer and less educated a country becomes the more the population is inclined to believe all sort of nonsense.
Populations tend to be made up of a fair number of people.

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