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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

Yea the fox AI is accessing basically a mesh or a graph and then the algorithm with the heuristic finds a local minima (or is it a maxima )?

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I think the true gem of this story is that it explains the inconsistent outcome/reason for this behavior, and hence the enduring community debate.

I.e. a fox can be leading you to a high-triangle-density area (aka treasure), or it can simply be leading you away if no treasure is about

And so players no doubt observed both of these outcomes... and hence the debate! And thus the nuances of the behavior somehow make it more magical than "fox always leads to treasure" simplicity.

This is always the case when you have probabilities in games... there will always be patterns in an individual's series of random numbers, and people will construct a narrative to explain it.

It reminds me of Onyxia in WoW, where the leading theory for a long time was that you needed Damage over time spells (DoTs) on her to prevent her from doing her damaging fire breaths, which would wipe the entire raid group. Turns out it was just random (confirmed by a developer long after), but it is interesting the meaning that can and will be assigned to random events. Probably the same mechanism that causes myths and eventually religion to form in real life.

Or how pressing A/B at the right moment after throwing a Pokeball increases chance of Pokémon capture in RGB.

Funny, that. In my psychology 101 class, I was thought that random and intermittent rewards work better for conditioning behaviour than consistent rewards.

So in a way, the inconsistency might've pulled more people in.

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