Well hey that sounds quite interesting! Thanks for putting it on my radar =D
sp3ctr4l
That sounds difficult to pull off, but incredible if you could.
Not only is a time loop built into the main story, recreating something from another perspective... it also has branching paths in the more linear sense of a roleplaying game / imsim.
I like this idea too, but ...'nudging' the player, without it being too estoeric, or too obvious... that ain't easy lol.
thevoidzero basically captured my response, but yeah.
A total fucking moron is a person who is literally too stupid to understand anything going on around them at anything but the most basic level of abstraction.
They have no ability for critical analysis, very little independent thought going on beyond what immediately and directly affects them, personally.
That isn't to say they can't learn. Its just that they can't really 'think'.
'The mark of an educated man is the ability to honestly entertain a thought they do not believe in.'
They can't do that, that would be very difficult snd confusing for them, cause them immense discomfort.
Functionally too stupid to be responsible members of a modern democracy, easily tricked by propoganda... essentially amoral, because they cannot formulate nor adhere to any kind of consistent, intentional moral framework.
...
The 29% below... well, they may or may not be relatively stupid, but they at least have a consistent belief, albeit an evil one... this shows they have an above elementary capability for abstraction and consistentcy.
Which unfortunately also means that only about 30% of people are, at worst, well intentioned, but could also possibly be stupid, though not as stupid as our glorious 40% in the middle that is easily swayed by rhetoric, phrasing, emotional manipulation, "vibes", etc.
I was going to suggest basically what you said in the first paragraph, but I didn't want to influence your own creativity =D
As for the second paragraph... depending on exactly what you mean by machine learning... say, possibly a more brute force, genetic-mutation, run 100s or 1000s of iterations to generate a 'strategy' ... that may be overkill.
I would suggest looking into Goal Oriented Action Planning, GOAP. GOAP is basically a theory, a conceptual framework of how to program AI, in the video game sense of AI... but it is way, way more computational lightweight.
It is also what made FEAR's AI so distinct, (the FEAR AI programmer invented it and named, has either an academically published or at least technical 'white paper' on it), convincing players that it was actually intelligently reacting to them, the environment, and making its own decisions... because arguably, it was, or at least doing a much more 'realistic' approximation of this at a fundamental level.
The difference between this game, your game's implementation of GOAP and most other ones... would be that it is like, the levels themselves, the sort of plot line itself, the 'dungeon master'... that is the Goal Oriented thinking agent, not just an npc entity in the world.
You can find some good explanations of how it works, how to implement it in a game engine, on youtube... though ironically I must warn you that a lot of tutorials from basicslly indie devs... they often do not fully even grasp the concept.
Which is funny to me, as they are not intelligent enough to understand a model of machine intelligence, yet feel confident enough to explain it or criticize it, lol.
But yeah, if you have both a comprehensive tracking and logging system for the player's actions... well, oversimplified, GOAP roughly invovles a sort of pathfinding algo traversing a node graph, with weights between nodes... and connections between nodes, or the 'cost' of traversing them... changing based on the agent's current situation.
So... you would roughly be trying to do a 'best fit approximation' of the player's own decision making process... into the the node graph the game itself uses... and then you could maybe reproduce the player themselve's approach to decision making, and then make that into an npc agent, if you wanted them to truly like, mirror fight someone that 'thinks' like them, at some point.