How do holodecks capture peoples' personalities?

[hxclespaulplayer]

I'm rewatching DS9's "Inquisition" and it struck me - there are a dozen of Bashir's fellow officers and everything, how they speak, mannerisms, behavior is identical to the real thing. I'm skeptical about it being having their "brains on file"/their neural net copied for Starfleet records (psyche profile couldn't be enough to replicate an entire person) but I can see controversy over this.

 

[Christopher]

This has been written about a lot in science fiction and AI research, and it was touched on in TNG's "Booby Trap" with the Leah Brahms hologram. In theory, if you program a computer with all available records of a person's speech or writings, things that are known about their lives and interests, and so on, it's possible to construct a simulation that can predict how they would behave or react in a given situation. The way websites track our activity and use it to tailor advertising to our presumed interests is a crude version of this kind of personality modeling. There are also computer programs that can simulate a famous author's writing style based on an analysis of their body of work. We have those today, so just imagine how much more advanced it could get in the future. In principle, the more data you gather about a person, the more accurately their personality can be simulated.

One example of this idea is in a novel named Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds. The story was catalyzed by the recent death of the matriarch of the main characters' family, and one of the characters had built a personality model of the matriarch based on all available records, assembled over a lifetime in a society with nearly ubiquitous communication and monitoring, so that there was a huge amount of data available. And they used the simulated matriarch to help them figure out what the real one had hidden away. The simulated person didn't know the things the real one had kept out of the public record, but otherwise she was so convincing that the main characters sometimes forgot she wasn't the real deal.

When you think about it, it's not that different from what an actor does when learning how to impersonate a real person, or what any of us do when we predict what our friends or family members would probably do in a given situation. The human brain is a very powerful simulation engine, and we all build mental models of the people we know and use them to predict their probable responses. And the better we know them, the more accurate our models become. Although there's always a margin for error (as "Galaxy's Child" made clear).

 

[bbjeg]

Facebook pages, tweets, and TribbleBBS too (the new thing).

 

[Mudd]

Every moment of these people's lives is under constant surveillance and recording.

 

[Timo]

...Indeed, the holodeck emulating people isn't the exceptional thing in Trek. Even Data, with his pitifully small positronic noggin, can supposedly emulate people if he puts his mind to it (say, play the violin exactly like somebody else would, rather than just repeating a past performance by that somebody), and he supposedly does that by only indirectly accessing records of such people. Most holodecks have far larger brains for supposedly massively more processing power, and a more direct access to records.

What amazes me is how the Founders do it - presumably without superbrains and with much less detailed records.

In both cases, though, it's also a matter of sheer processing power and speed. It's not a problem if you make for an unconvincing O'Brien if you correct your mistakes faster than your victim can notice. The human(oid?) brain will accept and ignore brief lapses and instead choose to believe in a satisfyingly consistent interpretation, i.e. choosing "This is O'Brien" over "This is almost like O'Brien - it had faults X, Y and Z but only for a brief moment". Unless X, Y and Z persist, or recur, or are accompanied by too many other letters of the alphabet.

I guess both the Founders and the holodecks do a lot of "cold reading" to make their illusions more appealing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[vulcan redshirt]

Since a Founder can adopt any form, maybe if one needs to perfectly emulate someone, they become their target's favourite jacket or something and study their target for a significant amount of time that way before replacing them.

 

[E-DUB]

I can buy a founder being able to impersonate you or me or a soldier like Martok, but I don't know how one could pull off impersonating a doctor in both personal and professional capacities.

As for the holodeck, Christopher pretty much nailed it. If you buy the simulation than it's good enough even if the "real" Leah Brahams wouldn't have acted like that (and in fact didn't).

 

[Timo]

Then again, DS9 would be full of fellow soldiers and especially Klingon warriors, each with a lifetime of experience in the nuances of Klingon warfare. One mispronounced bit of military jargon, one false move in the minefield that is Klingon honor rules, and "Martok" is toast.

Yet who on the station would be able to challenge "Bashir" on medical matters? He could be speaking pig Latin, prescribing his patients nothing but placebos, quoting random bits of Grey's Anatomy mixed with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and nobody would be the wiser. Some patients would die, and "he" could say they had it coming. Others might survive, and "he" would take credit even when not due.

As for personal qualities, Bashir was a known eccentric. How could anything "he" was seen doing be considered wrong or suspicious?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mudd]

One of my favorite moments in "Future Imperfect" is when Riker proves the ruse by giving Data a mathematical challenge that would be simple for the android but that the alien kid lacks the knowledge to respond to.

 

[Timo]

...One should remember that the alien boy was also multitasking, playing all the roles at the same time. Perhaps he could have handled each of the fake characters individually, making plausible excuses for his lack of LaForge-like engineering knowledge and Data-like processing power. Say, "Data" could have answered Riker's question with any sort of convincing-sounding nonsense and Riker would have been none the wiser.

The point is that Riker already was convinced that his "fellow officers" were fakes, and he relentlessly harassed all of them until the boy caved in. At that point, even if somehow the real Data had been there to correctly answer the questions, I'm pretty sure Riker would have declared the answers wrong and Data a fraud, since everybody else so obviously was but a poor imitation!

Timo Saloniemi