New And Surprising Ways to Be Mean: Adversarial NPCs with Coupled Empowerment Minimisation

Creating Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that can react robustly to unforeseen player behaviour or novel game content is difficult and time-consuming. This hinders the design of believable characters, and the inclusion of NPCs in games that rely heavily on procedural content generation. We have previously addressed this challenge by means of empowerment, a model of intrinsic motivation, and demonstrated how a coupled empowerment maximisation (CEM) policy can yield generic, companion-like behaviour. In this paper, we extend the CEM framework with a minimisation policy to give rise to adversarial behaviour. We conduct a qualitative, exploratory study in a dungeon-crawler game, demonstrating that CEM can exploit the affordances of different content facets in adaptive adversarial behaviour without modifications to the policy. Changes to the level design, underlying mechanics and our character's actions do not threaten our NPC's robustness, but yield new and surprising ways to be mean

Brainwaves and Sound Synchronization in a Dance Performance

In a previous work (Lucchiari and Folgieri, 2015) we considered communication among young people. New digital-natives do not communicate in a traditional way, but they choose different means and ways. It is not a surprising conclusion that a large part of digital-natives considers obsolete both Web sites\u2019 structure and Internet navigation modes, learning instruments and paradigms and communication tools, choosing, instead, fast and immediate media like mobile phone communication, social networking and so on (Croitoru et al. 2011). Notwithstanding we could think they lack of communication skills, actually, they communicate with each other much more than ever done, using not only the verbal language, but also images, videos, sounds, and especially emotions. We named this phenomenon telepatheia or, better, sympateia, meaning that they seem to keep in contact independently by the mean. Of course, on our intention, this does not mean that we are observing a new organic evolution, but surely a kind of evolution can be traced: an era in which human and machines are evolving, influencing one each other, determining a specific kind of communication strongly influenced and related to technology. In this paper, starting from our previous studies and from our concept of \u201csympateia\u201d, we performed a new experiment related to brain rhythms synchronization. Through our experiment, described in the following chapter, We want to explore the communication mechanisms of telepathy (in the ancient Greek assumption of \u201ctelepatia\u201d\uf020that is [tele]=\u201ddistance\u201d and [pateia]=\u201demotion, feeling\u201d). This does not mean that we are trying to make humans telepathic, but we aim to deeply understand communication mechanisms among humans through human-computer interaction BCI devices. This means to change the point of view of brain and Information Technology researches, stressing the point of view of self-understanding of the own brain

‘What it is Like’ Talk is not Technical Talk

‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness. The popular technical account of WIL-talk (see e.g. Lewis, 1995, and Kim, 1998) holds that WIL-talk involves technical terms — terms which look like everyday words but have a distinct meaning — introduced by philosophers. I argue that this account is incorrect by showing that the alleged technical terms were not introduced by philosophers, and that these terms do not have a technical meaning

The Aesthetic and Cognitive Value of Surprise

It is a common experience to be surprised by an artwork. In this paper, I examine how and why this obvious fact matters for philosophical aesthetics. Following recent works in psychology and philosophers such as Davidson or Scheffler, we will see that surprise qualifies as an emotion of a special kind, essentially “cognitive” or “epistemic” in its nature and functioning. After some preliminary considerations, I wish to hold two general claims: the first one will be that surprise is somehow related to aesthetic appreciation, because it is often the ground to judge of a work’s value. The second point will be that a functional analysis of surprise provides support for cognitivist accounts of aesthetics. If this picture is right, surprise would generally play an important part in aesthetic experience and should also be seen as a paradigm to study the cognitive powers of art

The road user behaviour of New Zealand adolescents

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13698478 Copyright Elsevier Ltd. DOI: 10.1016/j.trf.2009.09.002The present study aimed to describe the road user behaviour of New Zealand adolescents and to investigate the applicability of the Adolescent Road user Behaviour Questionnaire (ARBQ) to New Zealand adolescents. In total 944 adolescents were surveyed in the North and South islands of New Zealand. Factor analysis of the scale produced three factors which had acceptable internal reliability and were very similar to those found in the original research. The three factors were “unsafe crossing behaviour”, “playing on the road” and “planned protective behaviour”. This research also found that males and those who were at least part Maori were more likely to put themselves at risk by playing on the road. Furthermore, those who identified themselves as being part Maori also engaged in unsafe road crossing behaviour more often than Caucasian and Asian adolescents. Interestingly, only the interaction effect between age and sex was significantly related to engagement in planned protective behaviour. However, despite differences between New Zealand and England, and differences in the sample characteristics, the scale appeared to be measuring the same latent variables. Therefore, this research confirmed that the ARBQ is a useful tool for investigating the behaviour of adolescents on the road.Peer reviewe

Review of Jon and Susan Josephson, “Abductive Inference”

This article reviews the book '“Abductive Inference” by Jon and Susan Josephson

'You have to be adaptable, obviously' : constructing professional identities in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong

In spite of the increasing globalisation of the work domain and the mobilization of the workforce (Wong et al. 2007) only very little attention has been paid to the interplay between culture and professional identities in workplace contexts. This paper addresses this gap by exploring some of the ways through which professionals are required to construct and negotiate their various identities in increasingly multicultural contexts where notions of culture may become particularly salient. We focus on multicultural workplaces where, we believe, the intricate and complex relationship between culture and identity is particularly well reflected: In these contexts members are on a daily basis exposed to culture-specific perceptions, assumptions, expectations, and practices which may ultimately be reflected in workplace communication, and which impact on how professional identities are constructed. Drawing on a corpus of more than 80 hours of authentic workplace discourse and follow-up interviews conducted with professionals we explore how expatriates who work in Hong Kong with a team of local Chinese construct, negotiate and combine aspects of their professional and cultural identities in their workplace discourse. Our particular focus is on two issues that have been identified in participants’ interviews: Sharing decision making responsibilities and negotiating a work-life balance. Our analysis of these two aspects illustrates the complex processes of identity construction from two different but complementary perspectives: i) the ways in which participants portray themselves as adapting to, negotiating or rejecting the new culture in which they work and live; and ii) the ways in which these perceived identity construction processes are actually reflected in participants’ workplace discourse

The Freedom of the Christian for Culture

(Excerpt) It is somewhat surprising for Timothy Lull to be invited to address a liturgical conference of any sort. I was talking to several of my colleagues at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary this week about what I would be saying, and one of them said, Ah! Is Lull among the liturgists? He seemed surprised These colleagues wondered if you knew, for example, that I describe myself as a recovering evangelical catholic, or if you would know that I have the reputation in my congregation as being the great complainer about matters like the length of service, the fact that we sing no hymns written after 1750, that the basis for preaching almost never includes either the Old Testament or the Epistle lesson, and the kind of frightened anxiety with which we do things liturgical in our very liturgical parish