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Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

Soul score

A topic for discussing a possible alternative to gene score. So I can point here instead of going off topic in tangentially related threads.

The goal is to calculate the total effect a player had on their currently living descendants, across all lives.
I will use the words character and soul to distinguish between individual in-game lives, and IRL players that control them.
I'll describe a way to calculate the level of relatedness between a character and a soul.

1. Any Eve character is 100% related to her soul.
2. Suppose Alice is Belle's daughter, and Belle's relatedness to soul S is R.
   a. If Alice's soul is not S, then Alice's relatedness is R/2. That is, half that of Belle's.
   b. If Alice's soul is S, then Alice's relatedness is 1/2 + R/2. Half of Belle's plus 50%.

In effect this works as if each character had two parents: the mother character and the soul that was born as this daughter character. And the daughter character's "soul composition" is half of each parent.

"Soul score" of soul S is the aggregate relatedness of all living characters to soul S, divided by the number of living characters.

Some interesting properties:

1. Relatedness is a number between 0 and 1.
   1 means Eve, 0 means none of the character's ancestors were played by the given soul.
2. For a given character, the total of her relatedness to all souls is always 1.
   "Soul composition" is a unit vector of all relatedness values'.
3. For a given soul, the total of it's relatedness to all living characters is always between 0 and the number of living characters.
4. Similarly, soul score is always between 0 and 1.
5. The sum of all soul scores is always exactly 1.

Last edited by Kinrany (2019-11-11 23:11:31)

Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

Re: Soul score

Note that by itself soul score is just a number. (Just like gene score.) It could be used in a leaderboard, but that's about it.

If players were incentivized to increase their soul score, I think the optimal play would be that of trying to have as many descendants as possible. (Not just direct children.)

But it wouldn't incentivize players to care for their sisters and other relatives, not by itself. This could be fixed by making players more likely to be born as their own descendants. This would also align souls with genes: creating multiple copies of oneself is philosophically similar to having a chance of being teleported into one of the newly created copies of self.

Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

Re: Soul score

Also this thread is just me being an architecture astronaut, I don't expect any of this to become a part of the game.

(Though it's totally possible for the soul score to be implemented outside the game, since it's just a number. I've already started doing it, but I'm easily distracted by new shiny project ideas.)