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Table of Contents
This page is part of a series on
Systems
Systems
Emotions Engine
Comms Engine
Direct Engine
Core
TRANSCOM
Mechanics
Interceptions and Encounters
Claim
Other
Statistical Inevitability
Malus Necessarium
Conversation Difficulty
50%
Probably Wrong
Systems/
Comms Engine
In my brain, communication is explained through three things:
- The mechanics are described through Interceptions and Encounters. Intercepting gets us into an Encounter, which is how a conversation starts, runs, and ends.
- TRANSCOM is the interface my brain uses to converse. It decodes speech into thoughts and ideas, and it encodes thoughts and ideas into speech. Coarsely, but it sometimes gets the job done.
- Finally, there is the Comms Engine. The Comms Engine is what my brain uses to decide what to say. It is essentially a chess engine for conversation.
This is the final part of the series. If you're reading this for the first time, you are encouraged to read the pages in order.
Introduction
The Comms Engine is the part of my brain that actually makes the decision on what to say. It takes in and analyzes data (supplied mostly by TRANSCOM, body language analyzation and context analysis), considers the circumstances of them and myself and it considers the social context, all to ultimately decide which is the best course of action. The best course of action is an idea in my head, and this idea is handed over to TRANSCOM to encode it into speech. However, it doesn't just decide what to respond with, but also when1) and how2). The Comms Engine is constantly running, even during silence, re-evaluating the best course of action and calculating the best odds at every conceivable moment.
To do this, the Comms Engine makes its decisions based off of all my life experience, queueing any and all experiences even tangibly related to the current situation. While I have more and more heuristics in place today, this used to be extremely hard and manual work, and it often took me very long times to respond to even basic questions. Delayed response times are still a thing, even though my Comms Engine is now also better at framing those situations socially acceptably.
Development
Development of the Comms Engine has stagnated a bit as I begin to run into repeat situations and find proposed solutions and improvements to be satisfactory. Additionally, as I become more and more able to actually access the emotions inside of me, I become better able to outsource things like these to my emotions, reducing the general workload of my conscious (and un-conscious) mind.
Having never really grown up with access to my emotions, I had to learn immense volumes of data about social etiquette, as I would not behave “conformingly” by default and needed to learn these rules more like mathematical equations, not human intuition that just comes to you, naturally. I have spent my ages 8 to 20 mostly on constantly (like every few minutes) misunderstanding humans, because humans do not use words for what the words mean. So much is communicated through how a word is used, completely regardless of grammar. This is why I have such a gripe with Words. These days I am learning new things every few hours.
I'm just gonna put this thought out here, if we all agreed on standard TRANSCOM-style communication, it would reduce the workload of my Comms Engine by several orders of magnitude.
See also: Interceptions and Encounters, TRANSCOM