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engagement only employ actions that intensify the conflict”. So, after evaluation
the system might decide to increase, decrease or hold the current tension in the
story in progress.
(2) The purpose of preconditions is to avoid that a story in progress contains a
sequence of actions that does not satisfy common-sense knowledge (e.g. it is
not possible to cure someone unless that person is wounded or ill). During
reflection MEXICA checks that all actions' requirements in the story in progress
are satisfied. When the system detects a deed with unfulfilled preconditions, it
searches the dictionary of story-actions and chooses one whose post conditions
solve the problem. Then, the agent inserts it just before the unsatisfied event.
The added action might also have unfulfilled preconditions that need to be sorted
out. Thus, whole episodes can be included to satisfy the preconditions of a single
action.
(3) It is possible that during engagement MEXICA declares an impasse; i.e. the
story-world context of the story in progress cannot match any structure in
memory. In this case, MEXICA attempts to break the impasse employing the
“plagiarist” tactic: it looks in the Previous Stories for a similar situation and
copies the way it continues hoping that in this way the impasse will break.
13.2.4 Some Considerations About MEXICA
MEXICA does not work with natural language; it generates sequences of actions,
i.e. a plot. The following lines show an example of MEXICA's output (for the sake
of clarity some texts have been modified):
Jaguar knight is introduced in the story.
Princess is also introduced in the story.
Jaguar knight got intensely jealous of Princess
Jaguar knight simulated that he would hurt Princess but instead he hurt himself
Princess decided not to cure Jaguar knight
Princess attacked Jaguar knight
Jaguar knight and Princess fought
Princess killed Jaguar knight
Princess committed suicide
The system has the possibility of substituting the produced sequence of actions
with texts predefined by the user; the story at the beginning of this chapter is an
example.
The interplay between engagement and reflection and the way they influence each
other constitute the essence of the model. MEXICA obtains from its knowledge base
information that shapes the ER cycle (parameters that control internal processes
depend on such information); likewise, the outputs produced by the system can be
incorporated into the agent's knowledge base. Thus, all the elements that comprise
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