A great man once said...

If you think you're a good person, pious and sincere,
try to keep your mind to yourself until you see
what its like to want to destroy.

And if you have an anger, don't give much for men,
try to keep your hand behind your mouth unless
a greater love behind it grows.

WTF am I doing?

It would appear I am completely mad. Or at least, I'm committing myself more and more every day to a course of action with ill-defined goals, fuzzy methods and little chance of success...but it's so damn sexy!

Still, people should be more easily classifiable. I can't see why everyone has to meld and unbind, non-conformist to the neat typological boxes I have prepared for them. Damn them all.

It could be that my supervisor is correct, and Pacman simply won't serve to distinguish players. Or it could be that everything will be fine, once the data is processed, and any current worries are just a matter of zoom perspective. Can't see the wood for the trees - but when I focus on the wood, I forget the nature of the trees.

The Prisoner's Dilemma, a new formulation

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a Game Theoretic problem wherein two prisoners must choose whether to betray their partner in crime or remain silent. Betrayal is rewarded by going free, and the betrayed gets the heaviest punishment. If both betray the other, both gain a lighter punishment. But if both cooperate, then both gain the lightest punishment of all.

Nevertheless, since neither can know what the other will do, the rational move is always to betray the other in the hope of going free, and both end up with middling punishments instead of the lightest. This is only altered when the game is iterated, so that punishment for betrayal (i.e. future betrayal on the part of the betrayed) becomes a decisive factor.

It is interesting both as a mathematical problem and a philosophical/ethical one. But the really interesting thing is that such a simple choice begets such complexity when presented at the same time to more than one decision maker (or agent, in the terminology). The reciprocal effects drive the potential complexity through the roof - in other words, trying to calculate, or take account of, the actions of the other party, knowing they are doing the same for you and they know that you are trying to predict their actions when deciding what yours will be, and so ad infinitum...but where does that break down when the agents are fallible humans? How much calculation can one human do?
This is what makes player modelling a hard problem - you can't reduce it to a case of agents.

*Although actually, the prisoner's dilemma, a new formulation by moi: wank or work out!
:D

Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of meme

Despite the corny sponsor's advertising and the elitism inherent in the opening blurb (which I'm sure most of the participants would reject) - these TED talks are really worth checking out. Not only are interesting things explained, but they're explained by experienced public speakers, so its good entertainment.

Anyway, I really liked this talk because Mr. Dennett (or Danny D, as I like to call him) clarifies some thinking that I've had for a long time, but it never crystallised for me until now. So check it out...

Who are you?

"Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?"

Why does a person exist? What reason can there be to be conscious, feeling, capable of reason and emotion? Do these things, the trappings of the self, lend any value to our lives?

There is something to be said for wisdom, for the slow evolution of knowledge into greater understanding, compassion, and even altruism. For the individual, this can be a lifelong aim. But what are its larger social implications? For if living a better and better life is the goal of life, this is no more intrinsically valuable on the very large scale than living a horrible, miserable life. Because really, if the overall aim of higher learning becomes greater altruism, we've simply recursed back to propagation of the species. And if one seeks a goal beyond the self to motivate the betterment of the self, what need to look so far as wisdom? Build a family, a community to house it and leave some happy DNA behind. Who is to say that is greater worth to good works on a large scale than to a good life on a small scale?

Can we look beyond our selves and our DNA propagation for motivation to betterment? Progress alone seems to be a moonwalk, desperately racing to stay still. We cure our diseases, improve our nutrition, live longer and slowly kill the environment that is the backbone of our existence. Will we end up in UV-shielded floating biodomes, eating goop produced by the bacteria we trail beneath us in giant permeable microhorticulture farms, far enough below the surface of the ocean to protect their unicellular structures from the sunlight that kills everything else with now-unreflected radiation? [I wonder, would that work?]
So, what are we doing it all for? What is there beyond our own survival?

We theorise the self to be an evolutionary advantage, a cognitive capacity that allows non-instinctive behaviours and thus progressive goal-making beyond simple personal survival. But as noted, if you look closely enough, its hard to prevent these higher goals from looking recursive. If we had outlived any other species, that we weren't directly responsible for the extinction thereof, we might be able to say that consciousness is a mutation that was a true advantage in the evolutionary stakes. But on the evidence, all we can say is that in our class of lifeform, it will possibly be responsible for our being the last of the extant lifeforms.

So what is your self-hood there for? Why has this collaborative collection of cellular robots evolved to embody a higher order mind?
Who are you?

How do we know what we are?

Once, a student wondered about many things, and questioned constantly in his quest to attain enlightenment. One day, he asked the question "who and what am I, so that I can seek the path to enlightenment?"
No one answered, and in that moment the student was enlightened.


I often wonder who and what I am, and in the wondering hope to move my experiential state vector towards a more optimal phase where information processed gives the greatest possible return on processing energy, thus increasing total wisdom. On occasion, I wonder if this wondering is not itself enlightenment of a kind. Consider this koan:

"A Zen master named Gisan asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath.

The student brought the water and, after cooling the bath, threw on to the ground the little that was left over.

"You dunce!" the master scolded him. "Why didn't you give the rest of the water to the plants? What right have you to waste even a drop of water in this temple?"

The young student attained Zen in that instant."

Clearly, the student already knew all that he needed to become enlightened, since his master did not provide him any new learning, nor pose a question the answering of which would lead to new learning, of anything outside himself. Merely, he gave the student a cause to reflect upon himself ("What right?") and his actions ("Why?"), and in so doing learn what it was that had previously seperated him from his Zen state.

What was this moment of revelation? What relationship does it have to enlightenment, to the classic Zen description of enlightenment - "It is no-mind...the disappearance of the ego...loss of all identification with the body and the mind. It is freedom from beliefs, opinions, ideals and concepts. It is always sudden, because it is not an achievement; it is already the case. It is a remembering."

On what level can this take place in the cognitive process? We can point to the concept of no-mind to bypass the conscious cognitive process, but the state of the mind notwithstanding the corporeal body remains. And it is difficult to accept that mind and body are not one, so that the state of the individual is both body and mind. Can we say that smaller enlightenments can take place in the day-to-day, because our tie to physicality makes the whole concept of enlightenment one that exists on a continuum. Once reached, it is not the end. Why not?

Compassion draws the enlightened one back, to continue to exist in disharmony with everyone unenlightened. Compassion is empathy. Empathy is fellow feeling. It is all predicated on knowledge of one's fellow, which is the encapsulation of the existence of other minds within a theory of mind.
In Accelerando, Charles Stross talks about the predictability of a normal human to one whose cognitive functions have accelerated, i.e. been boosted by direct interface with technology (something another TED'er - the insufferable but farsighted Ray Kurzweil - talks about). The theory of mind becomes so powerful that the normal human is essentially encapsulable as a predictive model (theories are postulated to predict real phenomena).
Can one feel compassion for an automata? A completely predictable person might look as such to the modeller. But the knowledge of the person required to build the model is itself an emotive context, and processing affective information causes affect. So compassion arises from knowledge, even when that knowledge is great as to be 'weakly godlike'.

Robert Thurman seems to be coming toward this viewpoint from a tangent in his talk for TED, available here. I am just rambling, but the notion that learning and consequent minor frequent epiphanies could be considered in a certain light as progressive enlightenment, even to the connection with compassion, is a comforting one. So much of our work is working toward completion of our own work, that considering its larger futility is all too easy. Who can change the world? But if the changing is worth the doing, then the fact that we are changing ourselves is worth remembering.

Work is the koan.

Dyscordian

Just a curiosity for those who accord discord, from this site.

The Simpsons Do Video Games, Pt.1

The Tetris effect has to be the clearest possible indication that computer games are naturally optimal Flow-inducing activities. As to why, well it has a lot to do with cognitive information processing. For more, look to the last link here.

Am I ethical?

Fig.1 Laughing at people in wheelchairs (and the Stephen Hawking voice) - ethical?

On foot of the ethics campaign over at onlyagame let me bare my soul, or at least post my moral values on the web like automobile accident statistics.

Am I ethical? You know, to be honest I would say the simple answer is "only when I feel it would benefit me". Which some might say, is completely unethical. But more meaningfully, I think that I have such trouble defining ethics, and imagining principled positions that would apply in practical situations, that addressing the subject of my own ethics is to address the whole sum of my existence, and my relation to an objective reality. This is all broadening the scope a bit much for the question asked, so instead let me take a bottom-up approach and answer a few (apparently) key instruments on personal morals (a word I assume to be interchangeable with 'ethics'). The hope is that these should provide a basis for an inference on what, in general, my ethics might be.

For anyone else currently feeling inconsistent or vague in their ethical position, there is a website (when is there not) which proffers these simple self-report tools that might help to focus thinking.
http://www.yourmorals.org is the work of psy­chol­o­gist Jon­a­than Haidt of the Un­i­ver­si­ty of Vir­gin­ia in Char­lottes­ville, Va. Found out about him from here.
Most surprising thing I found out about myself - I have a slightly higher sense of disgust than average. Students these days - what are we coming to?!


So without further ado, allow me to unveil...me!
_____________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia.

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of each of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained four questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations. This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

Your Score:
Average Score:
_____________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the The Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin.

The scale is a measure of your proclivity to feel disgust. People vary quite a bit in how strongly and how often they feel disgust, and in the kinds of things they find disgusting. Earlier research using the disgust scale showed that there are three sub-types of disgust:

1) Core disgust: the "core" of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.

2) Animal-reminder disgust: things involving death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations. These things remind us that we, like animals, are mortal.

3) Contamination disgust: this kind of disgust is a defense of the whole body, not just the mouth, from contact with dirty or sleazy people

The idea behind the scale is that disgust is an important and understudied moral emotion, as well as being an emotion about physically dirty and gross things. Disgust is involved in many moral codes, for example it appears to be part of the psychological foundation of widespread ideas of purity and pollution. Many religions (e.g., Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) have extensive rules for regulating human bodily processes and keeping them separated from sacred objects and practices. Disgust appears to provide part of the structure of these rules and practices. Disgust also has clinical ramifications, for it seems to be involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder and in a variety of phobias.

Your Score:
Average Score:

___________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the "Schwartz Value Survey," created by Shalom Schwartz at Hebrew University, Israel.

The scale measures the degree to which you value each of ten domains that Schwartz has found across many cultures. Values are defined as "desirable, trans-situational goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in people's lives."

The idea behind the scale is that there is an internal order and structure to values. Using various statistical techniques, Schwartz has found that the ten basic human values show a pattern of relationships that can be graphed as a circle (see below). Values that are next to each other are closely related; values that are across from each other tend to be opposed, or tend not to be strongly endorsed by the same person. Political liberals have been found to endorse the "openness to change" values, while conservatives are more likely to endorse the "conservation" values. We have put this scale up on Yourmorals.org because we are interested in learning how Schwartz's ten values (which include moral and non-moral values) relate to the "five foundations of morality" theory from Haidt and Graham, as measured by the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire."
The values are described by Schwartz as follows:

POWER: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources
ACHIEVEMENT: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards
HEDONISM: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself
STIMULATION: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life
SELF-DIRECTION: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring
UNIVERSALISM: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature
BENEVOLENCE: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact
TRADITION: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide
CONFORMITY: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms
SECURITY: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self
Your Score:
Average Score:
____________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the Social Dominance Orientation Scale, by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto (2001).

The scale is a measure of how you feel about hierarchy vs. equality among groups in society.

The idea behind the scale is a theory called Social Dominance Theory, by the same authors. The theory says that societies tend to be stratified by age, sex, race, and other group differences. People vary in how legitimate they think such stratification is. Males (and other groups with more power) tend to be more in favor of such differences, and to enforce them more actively. Sex hormones may also play a role: Men with high testosterone levels tend to have higher SDO scores. Political conservatives generally score higher on SDO than do liberals, but SDO and conservatism are not the same thing.

Your Score:
Average Score:
_______________________________________________________________

Well, just posting those has been an exhausting and time-wasting wrestling match with blooger.com (typo intended!), so no post-match analysis will be forthcoming...for now. Still, like those (undoubtedly wildly inaccurate) online IQ tests that always seem to rate everyone as a genius, its a worthwhile little diversion if you've never done it before - who knows, you might even learn something!

Man Bytes Blog: May Roundtable P.II

So, it took a little while to get back to it, but...
Well I thought a little more about how goals can bleed backwards into the process that achieves them, in the domain of gameplay. I think that anyone who has studied the relationship between means and ends in production systems would have a lot to say here. Essentially, the path along which one approaches the goal of an activity can begin to dominate one's perspective within the activity. A metaphor which just popped into my head is the hill-climbing false horizon. Most hills have concave sides, thus when climbing to the top one's shortened line of sight results in seeing a horizon that isn't actually the peak.
As with large, >1 man, software projects (which I'm sure we've all been involved in), playing a game is a matter of achieving many short term objectives along a definite path towards a given goal. But fortunately for game players, they almost never have to plot the path themselves, nor update it in a change control process, nor adapt to reductions in their agency*. I suspect if they did, the number of game completions would drop through the floor.

The point being, management of goals isn't a prioritised skill-set of game playing, which is one reason narrative is so important to games. The natural human tendency is to deal with what's in front of us and put the rest off. Too much complexity can completely shut a person down, render them incapable of action. I think there is a hierarchy of player goals, atomic actions forming the easy-to-process bottom layer, above that situated actions/reactions, then tactical, strategic and finally narrative layers.
So I contend that the gameplay process is actually a process of transference in this hierarchy, the player's attention forming a wave moving through the medium of the possible foci for her attention - that is, the medium of goals. And the transference occurs continuously, as players complete atomic actions, that lead them through situations, each of these requiring tactics that serve a strategy. Since narratives are mostly linear and pre-designed (so far: even GTA just allows you to ignore the narrative at will), these are out of the player's control and thus form the anchor points of the wave, keeping it from becoming too chaotic and unraveling. Not that game devs could provide that much content anyway!
The goals in each layer are aggregates of those in the layer below. From this perspective, we see that players embark on an activity for which they know there is a goal, though they don't quite know what it is, and they follow a process in order to get there, although they haven't specified the process since they don't know where it's supposed to lead them. Instead, they work toward the nearest specifiable achievement, using the means given to them by the game mechanics, seeing it as a reliable method of finding new achievements to aim toward. You climb the hill in order to climb the hill. And (hopefully) finding this experience to be an optimal one (i.e. they enjoy themselves), the player memorises the pattern of cognition and/or kinesthesia involved in the activity. This reinforces the pleasure derived by the brain from experiencing it again, so long as enough variety remains to permit a level of novelty that matches the individual's taste (correlating to their capacity for processing complexity).

A game doesn't end when you produce something, it ends when there's none of it left to do. Maybe, there are no goals to games! *(I wonder what kind of game that would make - where progress is measured by power-downs, kind of like aging backwards. If you start off as the Destroyer of Worlds and progress down to Imp#5276, would you be bothered playing?)