What are some examples of induction in daily life?

[Eiuol]

Induction occurs all the time in many contexts, not just when coming to philosophical principles or scientific conclusions. So, I'm fascinated to hear how people apply ideas of induction to daily life, perhaps even when they don't realize they're even doing induction. I can think of anything from learning a new recipe, to playing a video game, to figuring out who is the killer in a movie. What are some playful examples of induction that you can think of in your daily life?

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Playing RPGs makes me think of induction quite easily and readily. It's important to quickly develop strategies to defeat enemies at the time, sometimes having to make decisions before I have all the information I want. If I want to win battles, I need to figure out how to efficiently figure questions out I may have about an enemy. Induction here involves what abilities work, and which aren't nearly as efficient.

When I played Final Fantasy 6 a few months ago, I had to figure out strategies for bosses. Usually I'd go through possible weaknesses to the different types of magic. I'd try ice, fire, or lightning first, see if the boss is weak to any of those elements. I'd even have my non-casters use spells as well, as if a boss does have a weakness, the battle is much quicker. Still, I might find no weakness, so I let my main caster go on as normal by using high rank spells. As I learned throughout playing, I need at least one healer on bosses so I can last safely enough while I look for a weakness. But through that need, I saw how a healer can also buff up my party early on when my party doesn't have a lot of damage taken. This is, for the most part, applied to all bosses. Then again, I've learned that from years of playing video games, so I have a basis already for building up ideas applicable specifically to Final Fantasy 6. Dedicated healers are nice, but since healing spells are quick for party members to learn, I really noticed how a specific healer isn't always needed. Healing with my party members that did less damage overall were my best bet rather than those with only high magic damage stats, especially since if there are no boss weaknesses, most party members do similar damage. The ones that do notable damage I keep as my preferred damage dealers.

The only thing additional I need to figure out what a boss does and how to defend myself – attack strategy isn't my only tool. One boss was such a pain because I thought I was doing so well. There was a head and body, and both were separate from each other. A few other bosses are like this and both usually need to die, so I attack the body first. I progress fine, although it's annoying that the head keeps healing the body. It's nothing too difficult to handle, so I keep going. My mana started depleting – if it hit zero, I wouldn't be able to heal anymore. I pulled through, killed the body... but then the head revived the body. Needless to say, my whole party died soon after. Judging from my difficulty, I figured the next time, I needed to do a lot of damage to the head quickly. Sometimes in games, a healing body part of a boss is the weakest part of all, so that should be killed first. Only in newer games is this really violated as a rule, so I should have remembered that since Final Fantasy 6 is at least eighteen years old, “healing parts die first”. When I tried the boss again, I killed the head first, without a great deal of trouble, then the rest of the boss.

The whole process there is something I've take for granted in the past. I don't really think about my “weakness test” method, or even realize that I'm taking principles from other games (e.j. how to arrange healing for parties in RPGs). But when I analyze what I'm doing, I'm acting pretty inductively – developing principles to use that will be automatized later in the game.

[dream_weaver]

I'm not a big RPG or even video game player here. Part of your consideration is that the programmer is, too, abiding by certain considerations. Video games are developed to appeal to video gamers. As such, programmers are going to adhere to certain principles while developing their games.

 

Part of an induction here is keeping in mind what a programmer may have in mind. They are not likely to present you with a screen consisting of 640 x 480 pixels with a 256 color combination resulting in a 1:78,643,200 chance of resolving the scene in order to get to the next level. However cryptic a programmers considerations are for attaining the next level, how often is it something that makes 'sense' relative to some aspect of reality you can somewhat relate it to - even if it is obtuse?

 

Perhaps I'm using this as scratching at the surface of an induction to the methodology behind the development of a video games by a programmers.

 

Matrix, Inception, Eraser come to mind here.