Tangential, but it feels like most game AI fails to model the “mind” of the agent: what do they know? How do they learn things? It always feels like they have a

Tangential, but it feels like most game AI fails to model the “mind” of the agent: what do they know? How do they learn things? It always feels like they have at most a subset of hard-fact world knowledge, but never their own (mis)conceptions. Of course, this is still modeled in the first order for things like enemies not seeing you in stealth games, or police not alerted if nobody sees the crime. In reality, each agent models the world and makes judgments based on what they’ve seen first hand, what they’ve heard, and deductive reasoning. It would be interesting if game AI was modeled on first principles from incentives, direct observations, and (with human agents) what they’ve been told multiplied by how much they trust the person. Doesn’t require general purpose reasoning, and could still rely on a set of simplistic game world events and actions. The hope is this would lead to varied and unique experiences through emergent behavior, eg: - An enemy that observed you use an extremely powerful weapon would be more cautious of you, but not others. - Hurting an npc without being detected can cause them to accuse and retaliate against an innocent person nearby. - Lying to someone in dialog about an event they observed directly would be contradictory and thus they would not trust you. - Hurting neutral NPCs without killing them can lead to negative rumors spreading topologically, based on your physical appearance - … so if you change your appearance you can be anonymous, but not towards the direct observer, which will recognize your face. Anyway, rambling. But this type of theory of mind stuff seems reachable and kind of fun. At least the first order modeling (for npcs who don’t use language), would be a lot simpler. Once you get into “they don’t know that I know Q, so I can lie about X to achieve Y”, things can get quite complicated.