I might be supersticious. 🙂
There is a certain form of beauty in simplicity, a certain form of elegance.
Artificial Intelligence is often complex. Even when applied to games. I think this comes from the fact that it tries to replicate human beings. And when analyzed, human beings turn out to be complex.
But when not analyzed, they are not! When you are not trying to replicate it, and you are just living, life is pretty simple. If humans would require A.I. to regulate our lives, we’d all be exhausted all the time! 😉
For technical reasons, simplicity is also desirable. The more complex a program is, the more unwanted effects it can generate (including bugs). Also (pertinent in the case of the author) the simpler a system’s design, the less programming skills are required to build it.
Programmers often seem to think that quantity is the solution to all problems. Just add more pixels, more polygons, more CPU cycles, more behaviours, etc and ultimately the problem will be solved. But I really think that in the case of A.I., you can never add enough. Your copy will always be inferior to the original.
The solution lies , I think, in finding a different problem to solve. The problem should not be to try and imitate life. It should be to create inspiring drama. So instead of a scientific problem, it becomes an artistic one.
The artist tells stories that are superior to life while the A.I. scientist always underperforms. The artist succeeds in doing this largely through stylisation: leave out uninteresting aspects and exaggerate the interesting ones. Simplify things to make them more clear. And -especially- appeal to the spectator’s uncanny ability (and desire) to fill in the gaps. When the artists omits certain things, the spectator can add them. He almost always does this in appropriate ways because both painter and spectator are humans and often they have a shared cultural background. And even if he fills in the gaps in ways that the artist wouldn’t have, it is still acceptable because most of the time, the spectator will fill in the gaps to make the art piece become more enjoyable for him.
There’s no need to paint the things that the spectator can imagine. In fact, and this is where stylisation really pays off, in my opinion, a lot of the joy of experiencing art lies in this activity of filling in the gaps. Perhaps because requiring the spectator to do some work to understand the scene immediately leads to empathy.
So, superstition or not, for the Drama Princess project, I will reject any system that seems too complex. If there is a solution, it needs to be simple.
Posted on May 7, 2006 at 9:41 am
Cinema actually offers us great examples of how believable characters can be built without going through lengths to make them seem intelligent. Most of the work is actually not done by the actor, but by the camera person and the editor. They make the difference between a display of reality and an engaging story.