Do robots have feelings?

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

Aha, I assume that you will duck. You probably will. But the question is, if you escape the large, blunt object, will you begin ruthlessly beating me with a baseball bat, or will you walk away, singing some nondescript show tune like nothing happened?

Well, that depends on many things. Mainly my personality. But, using some fuzzy logic, you can give a robot personality traits as well. I know very little about fuzzy logic, so I'm going to use a discrete value between 0 and 100 for now.

int angry = 63;
int compassionate = 25;
int nice = 17;
int aggressive = 97;

So there you have my personality. I'm an somewhat easily angered guy, that will become very aggressive once I am angered. From this data you can assume that I will pick up that bat and beat you.

int angry = 27;
int compassionate = 73;
int nice = 82;
int aggressive = 12;

From this data, however, you can assume that I will probably ask you why you would do such a thing and then probably forgive you.

Now, I'm not expert in the workings of emotions, but I'm assuming this is kinda-sorta how a human works. These traits are variable, depending on our environment, upbringing, and an infinite amount of other things.

Now, I kinda forgot where I was going with this, so bear with me here. I think I was trying to make a link between how humans react to things according to their upbringing, environment, and other factors and how robots can be programmed to react also depending on their environment and other factors.