Structure of the Taeb AI Behavioral Part 2

The Behavioral AI has 4 possible personalities which are defined by the Perl pm's Explorer, ScoreWhore, Bathophobe, and Descender. Explorer.pm is the base personality. ScoreWhore, Bathophobe, and Descender are all based upon Explorer.pm.

When Explorer.pm is instantiated by the Taeb framework, a hash, %behaviors, is created. This has uses the string names of actions as keys;These keys are mapped to instances of a TAEB::AI::Behavioral::Behavior::actionStringName. Explorer.pm contains an array of strings called prioritzed_behaviors.

Each time next_action is called, the work is done in Behavioral.pm. When next_action is called, the first task accomplished is that the criticalness of each action, which we will now call a behavior, will be calculated. The criticalness of each behavior is a property which is called urgency, which is either a string or numeric value. The string values of urgency are critical, important, normal, unimportant, fallback, and none. The corresponding numerical values are 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, and 0.

The method next_action calculates the urgency for each of the behaviors in the prioritized_behaviors. The urgency is calculated by the find_urgency method. For each behavior, find_urgency examines the current state of the agent with respect to the environment and sets the urgency member value. As the urgency is calculated, next_action is always looking for the behavior with the largest urgency. If multiple items have the same urgency value, the behavior that is in the prioritized_behavior first is the behavior that will be selected for generating a nethack action. Sometimes, no urgency is calculated. In the case of Explore.pm, the prepare method merely executes the Explore behavior each time Explore is examined during the next_action method.