“Art + Life: Life made by Man rather than by Nature”. -Langton (Langton)

The AI approach tries to choose emotions depending on certain factors. It can use some fuzzy logic to determine what emotion to display on some fuzzy input. Then there might be models for expressing such emotions, such as the facial animation system used in Half Life 2 (Valve 2004), which works pretty well, but it has one expression for one emotion, so it’s pretty simplified. Also, the matching emotions are pre-set by designers. This can cause problems, for example: Affirming by nodding your head forwards and back is something that we are used to in the West, but in some Eastern cultures affirmation is signalled by a movement from right to left. So these definitions of which expression leads to what emotion should not be generalised and pre-fixed. If you do so, you might have to consider different societies conventions. Expression should be unique to the character itself. In the best case the character would learn which expressions cause what reaction. In that way in a similar society they’d all end up using the same expressions, while in a different society they would learn others. I think this is the basis for language as well, because language is the expression of certain facts about the environment. So for example “chair” would be different in every language, because we all learn it from our social environment. I don’t know if Chomsky and the lot agree, but I think that the development of the same concepts exists (because they exist in our shared reality), but language is dependent on where we are and what we are surrounded by and who we want to affect in what way.

That’s why I think these approaches of assigning certain expressions to certain causes are not right. Another example is the Oz project by Michael Mateas had a similar result. They applied Ortony Collins and Clores binding of expressions to certain emotional situations. These were displayed by little animated creatures called Woggles. They found that the ones where they had made binding errors were deemed to have the most personality by observers: Users reported that the Woggle that repeatedly banged its head against the ground was the most interesting and described it as neurotic, angry or upset. They had all these connotations about the crazy Woggle, while the Woggles that had “correct” or plausible bindings such as “get angry when hit” or “be sad when alone”, the observers just noted that they thought the Woggles were simply programmed to do so. The interesting thing was that the most believable behaviour was due to a programming error in the simulation and not deliberate. This shows that it is often not the expected bindings that seem the most interesting. The individuality of a reaction is more important than the fact that the reaction corresponds to some kind of social convention.

This was using AI systems (in terms of defining specifically, symbolically or logically which input gives which output). You could use fuzzy logic, but it is still deterministic – a given input forms a given output unless you use a random variable somewhere. I don’t like random variables. Random just means “I don’t know”, just like 50:50 or 50% means “I don’t know”. So essentially what Im looking for is some system which allows a creature to perceive certain emotional expressions from its environment and then try to emulate these expressions on the output end of its own … feeling. Basically we want to create a connection between the expression of an emotion that we see externally, to something that we feel internally. So once that connection is made, if I feel that emotion – I will express something similar to what I saw before. That way, through this “adaption” process – you could call it adaption, synchronicity, copying or pattern matching (it’s all in the same vein) – with that kind of process, we would get the individual expression that really forms the character. Interesting is that if you have a character or child grow up different cultures at the same time. Say it spends half of its life in India and the other half in the US or Europe, the expressions used would be very mixed, just like the language would be mixed.