During the
implementation of my retro-causality prototype, I quickly got stuck by the naïve
implementation I did for the “collapsing process” of Quantum Entities. An
upgrade of this system was urgently needed and I continued to use Quantum
Mechanics metaphors to do it.
As a
reminder, a Quantum Entity is the root class of nearly everything in DramaticGames.
It is an abstract class that is “just” a collection of properties. Contrary to classical
objects, each property has several potential values at the same time.
The
properties of an Entity are “collapsed” when they are observed. That is to say
that when the player does an action that needs a single value of an entity
property, the collapsed value is selected randomly amongst the potential values
of the property.
The random selection takes into account the probability of
each potential value and, by doing so, allows the DramaManager to influence the
outcome of the collapse process.
This
collapsing process can be enhanced by remembering the different observations
made for a value and by logging them. This logging mechanism allows the
DramaManager to later ignore observations at will and creates even more
flexibility for influencing the system (what I named the backstage in my other
post).
In addition
to the collapsing process, another mechanism is necessary to support the
previously described retro-causality and entanglement system. This additional
mechanism introduces a representation of the interactions in-between entangled
entities.
The handling of those interactions is done by what is called “decoherence”
(this is just a metaphor, real Quantum decoherence is calculated differently).
Interactions can appear and disappear during the life time of an entity,
depending of the DramaManager priorities when trying to realize Intentions.
Finaly, the
retro-causality process needs to query the past states of an entity, to be able
to check goals’ constraints that are retro-planned in the past (in retro-time).
To simplify things, we just consider consolidated short term past and consolidated
long term past.
The fact
that the past states of an entity are the consolidation of some of his previous
potential states brings the notion of potential and flexible past. A notion very
important to leverage fully retro-causality.
