Yeah, I know, this game’s so long in the tooth that the sequel’s due within a few months. I’ve picked it up again, though, because I always gave the Creature short shrift and was wanting to explore that aspect of the game more.
So I’ve got a few questions.
Does the Creature acquire and extinguish behaviors in a way similar to what we know about lab rats on a reinforcement schedule? The basics seem to hold true - if rewarded, the Creature is more likely to do that again. If punished, the Creature is less likely to do that again. Reward or punishment has to be immediate to be effective. But do more advanced things hold true, such as random interval reinforcement being more effective than fixed interval reinforcement?
Do realistic patterns show up when you’re trying to extinguish a behavior? (For example, if you had rewarded the creature for eating villagers before, does the creature eat villagers more often for a while after you’ve stopped reinforcing that behavior?)
I’ve been able to train the Creature to do multi-step things, like pick up a tree, plant it somewhere else, and then water it. I trained it to do this by reinforcing each step, and then reinforcing only the entire series of actions… and we worked out a way for me to tell him to do this, and he’s getting better at responding to other ingame signals (like an empty wheat field) spontaneously… so it seems the AI is at least in that way consistent with the observations of Mr Skinner.
Couple of other, even less profound questions:
- how do you get the creature to use miracle wood to supply the workshop? At first, he would only toss trees into it when I modeled the miracle. Close, but no cigar. Thought maybe the two behaviors were considered interchangable to the AI, but after I got rid of all the surrounding trees, still no dice. The usually very bright Creature just stood there and said he already knew how to summon wood from thin air.
- What do I need to do to get the Creature to supply food at the Worship Site? No amount of modeling, begging, or threatening has ever got any creature to do this even once.
- what really causes the Creature to get bigger?
- does it matter how much the Creature poops?
- If the Creature always does very nice things for my own villagers, but occasionally does nasty things to enemy villages, how does that effect his alignment?
Any Creature wisdom is appreciated. Really interested in finding out how this works… before Black & White 2 comes out with a completely different Creature training model.