Social communication is a very complex thing...

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jc6chan
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08 Oct 2010, 7:06 am

...if you think of it from a robot/computer programming perspective.

First of all, you need a bunch of "if" statements, and it is multi-dimensional too. Its not a simple "if the person say this then say that". You have to consider the emotions invovled. You have to consider the context and background of the conversation. You have to consider their personality. You have to consider their age. Some things are inappropriate to say at certain times.

And then there is the receiving end. Is the person making a joke? Is it sarcasm? Is it a figure of speech? Why would they say such things, given the situation they are in? What context/background does the person come from?

And then there are all these nonverbal cues.

I sometimes wonder if people will ever be able to make a robot that acts like an NT. I highly doubt it.



wavefreak58
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08 Oct 2010, 7:58 am

The problem with programming it is that an IF ... THEN is a purely logical construct. Humans are irrational by nature, not logical. Even Aspies, while often predisposed to more highly structured thinking, are still irrational with enough frequency to make IF ... THEN statements a tool of limited utility when trying to programatically imitate their behavior.



Philologos
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08 Oct 2010, 9:21 am

Social communication is a cpontradiction in terms.

What goes on inside an individual CPU is not actually all that bad - complex, yes, balancing all kinds of inputs and working with a very large data bank. But logical [IF you grant the premises, which is a very big IF].

Thing is, take any two - even two almost interchabgeable NTs - and you get handshaking attempts between Arabic Win XP running a freeware com program designed by a Russian to use Japanese and an OS 9 Mac doing Yiddish. The code is not accessible and the inputs often - even between NT twins - fail to match anything alreasdy in there.



AdmiralCrunch
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08 Oct 2010, 12:53 pm

jc6chan wrote:
Social communication is a very complex thing...if you think of it from a robot/computer programming perspective.

Yes, quite! (Seeing as I'm in the process of reverse-engineering it...)

jc6chan wrote:
First of all, you need a bunch of "if" statements, and it is multi-dimensional too. Its not a simple "if the person say this then say that".

If/Then statements are what's used in a finite state machine, which has inherent limitations and are always linear. The non-linearity involved with decomposing, analyzing, and synthesizing human social communication requires a Turing-complete machine (TCM), which is much more complicated than If/Thens. The human brain is a TCM, and recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are starting to make computational TCMs a possibility.

jc6chan wrote:
You have to consider the emotions invovled. ... And then there are all these nonverbal cues.

I'm calling this affect dynamics. I'm basing it on the verbal, facial, and body affect that people present during conversation. I'm finding it rather difficult to implement, but still do-able.

jc6chan wrote:
You have to consider the context and background of the conversation.

Regressive analysis, part of AI.

jc6chan wrote:
You have to consider their personality. You have to consider their age. ... What context/background does the person come from?

I'm calling this the personality vector. It also includes culture, language, interests, etc.

jc6chan wrote:
Some things are inappropriate to say at certain times.

This is one of the most difficult things to model. I'm using modal logic for this, since it's too difficult to run discovery directly. Eventually, my project might be able to actually list out the rules associated with this.

jc6chan wrote:
And then there is the receiving end. Is the person making a joke? Is it sarcasm? Is it a figure of speech?

Affect dynamics plus sociolinguistic norms is the best bet here.

jc6chan wrote:
Why would they say such things, given the situation they are in?

Probabilistic inference and neural networks here.

jc6chan wrote:
I sometimes wonder if people will ever be able to make a robot that acts like an NT. I highly doubt it.

That's part 2 of my plan. First, I just want to get myself to act like an NT. :wink:

It looks like you got a head on your shoulders. You should consider working on AI; we're always looking for smart people.


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