Communicating Through a Narrow Channel: Perceiving Microbial Affect Over a Game of Go

Abstract

Interfaces between agents may display special powers owing to their narrow bottlenecks in communication channels, such as games or other virtual media through which agents are given to interact. In this paper, we propose to derive an agent's personality from their behavior in the Game of Go as an arbitrary substrate for communication. Our approach is agnostic to the type of embodiment of the player, which means that it remains as applicable to humans as animals or simpler organisms, even artificial forms of intelligence. We base our methodology on related works characterizing affective states, including the seminal pleasure-arousal-dominance framework that focuses on modeling personalities. Our preliminary results indicate that narrow bottlenecks favor a reduction in the feature set necessary to characterize a personality type, thus making for more interesting social interactions in and around game-play.