Tuesday, September 15, 2009

ANNE gets more emotional

It's been a while since my last post and that is due to the fact that I have been testing ANNE and expanding her emotional range. I am trying to set up a neural network for a "Smith and Ellsworth" style model, which reflects the feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, boredom, challenge, hope, interest, contempt, frustration, pride, shame and guilt by determined by the external factors of pleasantness, responsibility, certainty, attention, effort and control. Given that I don't have access to the model I am making up the matrix as I go. It takes around 15 min (!!) to train ANNE, but evaluations are instantaneous (Erlang is speedy), oh well if you need more precision, it takes 149 microseconds (µs = millionth of a second) on the average, a mean of 1µs and a maximum time of 15900µs (most likely the first call), so you could perform over 6700 calls per second to it, not even the most emotionally unstable human could evaluate that many ;) . What this shows is that a single process running this ann could easily evaluate emotional feedback for thousands of NPCs in the game world. Believe it or not, this rather simple matrix of (6, 20, 15) takes up 7 KB !! That's quite a mouthful of data, but anyway. Random tests show very logical although on occasion rather unexpected results, remember that anns do pattern matching, not value matching.

Here some random inputs with E being the emotions ann, note that sometimes even when changing 2-3 inputs they still result in in the same emotion. Curious, but consistent and no worries, it really does evaluate to all possible emotions depending on the training matrix and input. -1.5 denotes the lowest possible value, 1.5 the highest possible one, so f.e. -0.3 pleasantness means a little bit unpleasant, 0.5 control , means some control and so on. The output shows how certain ANNE is regarding the highest match, results near 1 mean very certain, while f.e. a "0.40 surprised" could mean a little bit surprised so you really get an emotion and a degree, the higher, the stronger. I am starting to love neural networks, this is so much fun :) . I am thinking, that animals probably don't need all these emotions, nor all the input factors, which might lead to different anns for different entities.

Well, it seems to me that I will still spend some time with the fine tuning, so be patient with me. If there is enough interest, I might publish the source code, too.

Cheers,

Sunweaver