LESSWRONG
LW

All of Jolima's Comments + Replies

The Fundamental Question - Rationality computer game design
Jolima20

I meant something like the difference between:

Bob says: "There will be an assassination..." Player's notebook is automatically filled with this information. The player can assign expected probability. Bob says: "Alice told me so" Player's notebook is automatically filled with this information marked as evidence for the previous claim. The probability assigned to this being true will automatically update the assassination claim.

Or what I was considering yesterday:

Bob says: "There will be an assassination..." Player manually wri... (read more)

Reply
0Kaj_Sotala
Sounds promising! I'll hopefully have the time to put together a design/prototype of my own tomorrow. Either of those could work, but I'm worried that the steps that the latter option would require would easily make the player feel like she was doing tedious work that could easily have been automated instead. I'm not sure about that, though: getting to enter the data could also feel rewarding. We'll just have to experiment with it. Well, if different beliefs have different consequences in the world ("if you believe the assassin is in the bell tower, go there to stop him") and the player is scored on his ability to achieve things in the world, that also implicitly scores him on probabilities that are maximally correct / useful. But this might not be explicit enough, if the player has no clue of what the probabilities should be like and feels like they're just hopelessly flailing around.
0DaFranker
I'm not sure about conflicting requirements. A bayesnet backend without integrated I/O, with an I/O and GUI made specifically for the game and possibility of reusing or recoding some of the I/O and writing a new GUI for the separate tool seems like it wouldn't introduce conflicting requirements, modulo code optimization and the increase in design and coding time. I don't think it's worth it though, unless it turns out this kind of modular system is best anyway. This doesn't sound like it'll scale up easily. Correlation maintenance needs to be done manually if new causes are linked to the same effect at runtime, which means the routine that adds a new cause has to know a lot about bayesian updating to do everything properly. For an extreme example, if the P(Z|¬A1) is .01 for A1 = Person X is Evil, and Z = Murder happens, having in mind the .01 of "someone else not being modeled kills", and then later you add into the model the 999 other people without properly maintaining each "other cause" probability, you end up with a near-certain murder given that no one is evil. Or for a simpler example, there are two people, but you don't know about the other one. P(Z|¬A1) = .1, because P(A1) = P(A2) = .1, and thus P(Z) (base rate) = .19. If you later learn of A2 and add it to the network, you have to know that P(Z|¬A1) = .1 meant "There is still .1 that A2, but we don't know about A2 yet!", and subtract this from the (A1 -> Z) correlation, otherwise P(Z|¬A1&¬A2) = P(Z) = .19, which is clearly wrong. Overall, I think we should let the base rates speak for themselves. If P(Z) = .1, P(A1) = .1, and P(A1|Z) = .5, we know there's enough room in the base rate for A2 at the same rate and weight. Adding a new cause should require checking on base rates and reducing it by the rate/weight of the new cause, and warn or adjust the rate upwards if there's an excess. Having to check the other correlations seems like way too much trouble. Might be worth taking a look at how other appli
The Fundamental Question - Rationality computer game design
Jolima00

What seems to be taking shape while doing this is the idea of the player having access to a tool, mostly separated from the rest of the game, to help calculate probabilities. It would allow new (possible) facts to be entered with priors, facts split up into conjunctions, dependencies noted between facts and so on. The tool would then calculate probabilities for you while you tweak the calculation. (Possibly color coded or otherwise abstracted if we expect numbers to be seen as scary.)

I'm not even gonna try to do make this into an intuitive or full featured... (read more)

Reply
0DaFranker
I've already posted this link in a reply lower down the thread, but here. SMILE seems built explicitly to be used as an API, but I'm not sure I like the way it stores data nor its I/O methods. So far, OpenMarkov with the ProbModelXML are the most attractive implementations, and I think something closer to that (or perhaps use them as API / backend straight-up, depending on language considerations and interfacing issues) would be more straightforward to implement. As for looking for apps that do this for general use, I've been toying around with this for a bit and it seems quite fun and intuitive to use (well, to someone who knows some bayes anyway).
0Kaj_Sotala
Great! Welcome to the team. :-) Maybe. At this point, I'm not at all sure of what kind of an approach would work best and be the most fun; it's certainly worth trying a lot of different approaches. I'm not entirely sure of what you mean by "mostly separated from the rest of the game", but I was thinking that it would be pretty strongly integrated in the sense that information that you picked up from the rest of the game would automatically update the belief network. But maybe you meant besides that? I was supposed to create some rough prototype myself this weekend, but besides some doodling on the backs of old business cards, haven't really had the opportunity.
The Fundamental Question - Rationality computer game design
Jolima30

I'm interested in helping out with programming (which I do professionally, though not games related) and have joined the mailing list.

I'll try to make some quick prototype of the mechanics over the weekend unless anyone beats me to it.

Reply
0Jolima
What seems to be taking shape while doing this is the idea of the player having access to a tool, mostly separated from the rest of the game, to help calculate probabilities. It would allow new (possible) facts to be entered with priors, facts split up into conjunctions, dependencies noted between facts and so on. The tool would then calculate probabilities for you while you tweak the calculation. (Possibly color coded or otherwise abstracted if we expect numbers to be seen as scary.) I'm not even gonna try to do make this into an intuitive or full featured tool right away, but in a final release I would imagine a very polished interface with drag&drop graphs for dependencies, folding to hide irrelevant details etc. Early on in the game, there would be heavy prompting on exactly how to use the tool while later on the player would be left increasingly on their own in figuring out how to enter statements and facts she encounters. First of all, is this in line with what other people are envisioning? Secondly, this seems like something which may actually be useful in real life as well (and I could see the game ending with an encouragement to do just that). Does anyone know of such a tool which already exists? If nothing else, it might be good for salvaging ideas from. Some quick Googling doesn't reveal anything beyond simple tools where you can put in the numbers for a single equation and tools special fitted for a single application. Edit: Argument Map software seem to be what I was looking for.
How is your mind different from everyone else's?
Jolima-10

I've got this too and have learned how to do it more or less at will. This post from that same page ties the feeling to Seratonin release which seems to make sense. I haven't looked into it enough to say it's certainly true though.

Reply
The curse of identity
Jolima150

This is probably what I've been struggling with the most during my life. I'm starting to feel like I'm close to reaching a balance in overcoming it though.

Early on my primary goal in life was being Good. Along with a bunch of other traits, I deemed status seeking and signalling as Evil and strove never to do it.

That... is hard to do and of course I didn't succeed fully. What I did manage was becoming terribly passive and self-effacing, I second-guessed any activity I engaged in even as I was doing it and abandoned anything I recognized as being signalling ... (read more)

Reply
Meetup : Stockholm meetup
Jolima00

That's a 15 minute walk according to Google maps even after you've gotten out of the station, and those trains don't have the best reputation for being on time...

So, in case someone else arrives first: Did you/will you book a table that we can claim ahead of you?

Reply
0NihilCredo
I did call, but they unsurprisingly told me that on a Sunday afternoon there wasn't going to be any need to book a table even for a large number of people. So it will just be a matter of spotting each other - here's a quick picture of myself, just in case.
Meetup : Stockholm meetup
Jolima40

I've mostly been lurking here, but I'll show up.

Looking forward to it.

Reply
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Jolima10

Thanks.

I wasn't consciously inspired by it, but was aware of the terms. I'd still discount it as a coincidence though. (Or being a natural division to make.)

The terms kind of grew on me from using them separately in expressions. ("That's just story" when discounting some evidence, ""Life is" when being stoical (Or "Life is beautiful" when being happy.) and "What's his game?" and similar when reasoning about entities (people, organizations, myself). Then they just fitted as words to partition the world around.

Reply
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Jolima20

Hello, I'm John Lindberg a 26 year old Computer Scientist from Stockholm, Sweden. I've been reading this site for almost a year now. I'm a lurker by habit, preferring to listen rather than writing, but I really like this community, so I'll see if I can fit myself in.

I originally found Less Wrong through Stumble Upon to the Ureshiku Naritai article, liked it enough to browse the front page and found that I liked almost all of the articles there. That set of a long bout of tab explosion as I followed links from those to other articles. Eventually started rea... (read more)

Reply
1Emile
Welcome to LessWrong! Is it a coincidence if this reminds me of Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist roleplaying?