The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

Re:The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic ... by fluidcruft on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @12:10PM (#39359952)

Combinatorics gives the same six possible shapes as a basis set if stories are limited to at most four emotional states:

1. low, high

2. high, low

3. low, high, low

4. high, low, high

5. low, high, low, high

6. high, low, high, low

So, I guess it's mostly saying that there are at most four states... but the Harry Potter graph in the paper looks like 17 states would explain the data better.

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Re:The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic ... by araes on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @01:23PM (#39360883)

Part of the issue is the natural binary focus. If all states only have a positive / negative interaction with each other, then there can be no prime states other than 2. Silly Fry, 2's don't exist, only 1 and 0.

From a computer perspective, those are avoided kind of like how all games only want texture in 2 powers, because all other sizes are inconvenient. So everything that's ingested from media like video games is always arriving in a power of 2 format.

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