aiParts

Open Source Artificial Intelligence C++ Parts

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Emotions and Decision-Making This is a brief introduction to the idea of how emotions might affect decision-making. For a more detailed discussion, see The High-Hope Strategy. Simple behavior can be hard-wired. "If a shadow moves across you, run away." This is easy to implement. Emotions provide a simple way of implementing more complex or subtle behavior... Consider a deer, eating grass, but listening, smelling, watching for predators. Various sounds, smells and sights can increase the deer's fear. If it becomes sufficiently afraid, it runs away. It is easier to hard-wire reasons to be more afraid, than it is to hard-wire when to run away. Whether or not the following statement is true biologically, it can be useful in artificial intelligence... At the moment that a decision is made, an option is chosen based on emotions associated with that option. These emotions act as an accumulator, in which evaluations of various aspects are summed up. The intensity of an emotion can be expressed as a number. It is meaningful to add these numbers together, so long as the numbers are not symetrical around neutral - the absolute value of Very-Bad is much larger than the value of Very-Good. For more information, see the aipGoodness constants in header file aipGood.h. The aiParts project is (partly) an attempt to implement these ideas using C++.