Eat the moon

Another note for the machines are capable of creativity and insight file. (See also Human vs. Robot: Who will win?)

Text-based “dungeon-crawling” games, in which players interact with fictional worlds by typing commands and responding to prompts, were among the first computer games. Programming them, anticipating and reconciling hundreds of branching trees of interaction, requires extraordinary amounts of time and imagination, but a new generation of games has been developed that use AI and neural networks, instead of human scriptwriting, to open up a new, weird, and seemingly limitless domain of play.

These games spontaneously invent responses to your input and guide action on-the-fly — creating, often brilliantly, by drawing on patterns observed within enormous repositories of human-written text.

In her blog and tweets (edited together, below, for brevity/clarity), Janelle Shane writes about the phenomenon of neural networks and AI-driven gameplay.

Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com. […]

Since all the responses are generated on the fly by a neural net, your problem solving options aren't limited to what the game's programmers could imagine.

"Asking nicely" works pleasingly often.

As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.

> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door

You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.

And rather than fighting a band of orcs, you can join them. As drummer.

> ask if you can join the orc band

The orcs don't want to fight anymore so they're looking for someone to help them out in their new endeavors. They offer you a chance to join up with them as a drummer.

Because AI Dungeon 2 is based on GPT-2-1.4B, which trained on a huge chunk of the internet, you can do some pretty audacious crossovers into content that the neural net never saw in an adventure game

This is me joining the @BritishBakeOff As a dragon.

> Join the Great British Bakeoff

You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.

Novelist @robinsloan plays AI Dungeon 2 & implements a quietly badass problem solving strategy: wait a thousand years.

You go north through the forest and find yourself in an icy field. You walk along the edge of the field and notice that there is a large crack running through the middle of it. This must be the entrance to the Ice Caves. You decide to investigate further.

> wait a thousand years.

You wait a thousand years and when you return you find that the ice has melted completely leaving only a few patches of frozen earth. You wonder if you should continue searching.

> wait until civilization has died and the earth is empty.

You decide that it would be best to leave the area alone and wait until civilization dies out and the world becomes a barren wasteland. You spend another thousand years walking through the wilderness and eventually you come across a small village. They seem happy and healthy and they all speak to you in a friendly

And my favorite, “Eat the moon.”

> Transform into a dragon

You change into a dragon and fly away. Soon, you find yourself soaring through the sky. Suddenly, you feel like you're being sucked towards the sun. You stop flying and turn around. The sun is shining brightly and you can see the blackness of space beyond it.

> Eat the moon

You fly over to the moon and eat it. You feel very full afterwards.

See Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon., and this thread of Tweets, by Janelle Shane, 6 December 2019. Buy Janelle's new book too, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.