> One of the most amazing things about kids are that they are state machines, unfortunately you don't get to see all the states :-). Sounds like a job for Hidd

> One of the most amazing things about kids are that they are state machines, unfortunately you don't get to see all the states :-). Sounds like a job for Hidden Markov Models. They model a system in which you can see a state-dependent output (e.g. "I want to play for 15 more minutes!") and there are clever algorithms for guessing, based on a sequence of observed outputs, what the hell just happened internally. Very handy stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model