While looking for ways to connect with the shrimp, I used JEV, a probabilistic decision model that has been getting a lot of attention lately, to let the shrimp learn a kind of language. When a shrimp did something and you responded to it, for example by saying something while giving it food, the shrimp remembered those words and linked them to the situation. Later, in a similar situation, JEV gave each of the words the shrimp had learned a probability, and the shrimp said one of them based on those probabilities. JEV never wrote any words itself; everything the shrimp said came from what you had taught it.
I finished building it, and I thought it was fun. In the end, though, it was a failure. I felt that teaching shrimp to talk hurt the consistency of the game.
Still, this case is valuable for things like building an FAQ later on, and I think it’s worth checking whether the same approach could be used to teach the shrimp behaviors in the future.