I don't know how many of you are familiar with real world psychological theories but there's one theory called operant conditioning that I was musing over the other day (actually I had to learn about it for school but whatever) and I realised with that it actually fits the Creatures model of learning surprisingly well.
Showing posts with label Brains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brains. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 June 2017
Wednesday, 7 December 2016
Treba the One-Drive Norn
Looking through some of my recent posts... I haven't done a crazy genetic experiment in a while! Time to change that.
A while ago I was reading one of Jessica's posts on Discover Albia and it got me thinking: what would happen if you ticked "Winner takes all" in the drive lobe? It would mean the Norn could only feel one drive at once, but how would that actually affect the Norn in a practical way?
I think you know where this is going...
So, in this Norn I'm only going to make one single change: switching the drive lobe to WTA. If you're not familiar with what that option does, it makes it so that only one neuron can fire in the lobe at once, and the neuron which has the strongest value will be the one to fire. In the context of the drive lobe, it means that only the most pressing need will registered by the Norn.
Meet Treba, a cute little Cheri Norn whose wellbeing and happiness I have probably just permanently destroyed. But we'll see how she turns out.
A while ago I was reading one of Jessica's posts on Discover Albia and it got me thinking: what would happen if you ticked "Winner takes all" in the drive lobe? It would mean the Norn could only feel one drive at once, but how would that actually affect the Norn in a practical way?
I think you know where this is going...
So, in this Norn I'm only going to make one single change: switching the drive lobe to WTA. If you're not familiar with what that option does, it makes it so that only one neuron can fire in the lobe at once, and the neuron which has the strongest value will be the one to fire. In the context of the drive lobe, it means that only the most pressing need will registered by the Norn.
Meet Treba, a cute little Cheri Norn whose wellbeing and happiness I have probably just permanently destroyed. But we'll see how she turns out.
Thursday, 9 June 2016
Perception Lobe: Neuron List
You might remember that the last post I did that was actually about Creatures was on brains. You might also remember that I couldn't find anywhere that had a full list of what neurons in the perception lobe corresponded to which perceivable thing, so I put together my own list based on Chris's information on CDR. I also never got around to posting that list because I wanted to test it more.
Now, I was about to carry out some massive experiment to confirm what my list says, but as soon as I opened up BrainViewer I realised there was a pretty obvious way to check my list:
Now, I was about to carry out some massive experiment to confirm what my list says, but as soon as I opened up BrainViewer I realised there was a pretty obvious way to check my list:
Tuesday, 22 March 2016
Mucking About with Norn Brains
The title sounds like I did something awful but don't worry, I haven't severely disabled any more Norns yet. Today was observation only.
There's this great website out there, don't know if I've linked to it before, but it's called The Creatures Developer Resource. It's no longer being updated, but it has some really good information about the Norn brain and some astoundingly useful tools for analysing Norn brains. Norn brains are something I'd love to come to understand, but due to their complexity it's not good to jump right in and start making random changes that I think might work (which seems to be my approach to other areas of Norn genetics, hehe...), especially because, even with Chris's awesome tools from CDR, it's hard to understand exactly what the changes you've made have done if you don't understand anything about Norn brains.
So I thought that, in order to properly accustom myself to using Chris's tools and to wrap my head around something Norn brain-y—the Norn learning process, which I know about but have never seen in action on a neuronal level—I thought I would do a little bit of an observational experiment: I would create a new baby norn in a new world, and using the monitoring tools from CDR, see if I could track some of the things it was learning. I downloaded the Brain Viewer, Lobe Study, Brain Cell Monitor and Brain Activity from here to assist me with this experiment.
There's this great website out there, don't know if I've linked to it before, but it's called The Creatures Developer Resource. It's no longer being updated, but it has some really good information about the Norn brain and some astoundingly useful tools for analysing Norn brains. Norn brains are something I'd love to come to understand, but due to their complexity it's not good to jump right in and start making random changes that I think might work (which seems to be my approach to other areas of Norn genetics, hehe...), especially because, even with Chris's awesome tools from CDR, it's hard to understand exactly what the changes you've made have done if you don't understand anything about Norn brains.
So I thought that, in order to properly accustom myself to using Chris's tools and to wrap my head around something Norn brain-y—the Norn learning process, which I know about but have never seen in action on a neuronal level—I thought I would do a little bit of an observational experiment: I would create a new baby norn in a new world, and using the monitoring tools from CDR, see if I could track some of the things it was learning. I downloaded the Brain Viewer, Lobe Study, Brain Cell Monitor and Brain Activity from here to assist me with this experiment.