Comment by andrewstuart
2 years ago
I would have said ChatGPTs interface is a descendant of Infocomm adventure games which are a descendant of Colossal Cave.
When using ChatGPT it certainly evokes the same feeling.
Maybe this guy never played adventure.
Well there's a thought. A zorklike where the game content is whatever generative ML hallucinates (instead of the built-in fixed maps & interactions) -- as long as a second ML system agrees that the answer follows some more general rules.
For example: Rules say "In the beginning, the Enemy has a diamond. User cannot get the diamond from the Enemy if the Enemy is still alive. The Enemy is a fierce opponent and hard to kill." but nothing about the details of the enemy, shape of the map, or the available tools. Re-generate each response until it succeeds the verification.
Let the adventure be randomized by the hallucinations, while keeping some basic challenges in place.
An acid-tripping D&D dungeon master coming up with plot twists, combined with a rulebook-reading lawyer. Bonus points for adding generated "cut scene" visuals every now and then.
With the new function calling feature you may not need the second system. Only present options to ChatGPT that are valid. Feed it updated state information as JSON. Have it describe and elaborate on what the game engine is doing, or use functions to invoke entity creation that can then be tracked by the engine.
So for example the engine can do combat rolls and the LLM can give each a unique description of the type of attack and defense. Each monster or treasure can get its own unique description generated by the LLM that matches the stats given by the LLM.
Yes, but then I fear you're back to having limited "things that can happen", with predefined entities and so on. I'd prefer the acid trip to break more paradigms, tell a story, while the lawyer makes sure there remain challenges.
For example: with strict entities "behind an API", the diamond is the singular diamond and is a diamond. With an ML-based lawyer, well, maybe you can duplicate the diamond? Maybe you can transmogrify it temporarily into a non-diamond, which the Enemy drops as undesirable? Maybe you can wander into an elaborate system of mines full of dwarves who actually know how to mine a diamond, as long as you help them with this pesky dragon... No human has to come up with all these possibilities.
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ChatGPT already does really good adventure games.
"Let's play an adventure game, you be the DM. I want it set on a spaceship arriving at a planet after 10,000 year journey. It should have a sense of mystery and a slight sense of foreboding and dread. It must have at least 20 locations. The objective of the game is to find 10 colonists in the ship and get them safely to the surface of the planet. Make it play in the style of an Infocomm adventure. Don't tell me all the locations in advance, make discovery part of the adventure."
As a form of story telling, yes.
As a challenge, not really. You can just convince it to let you win. (Said differently: the meta-game is too easy.)
You need the second layer of output validation[1] to re-add the challenge of solving a puzzle.
[1] or some such mechanism; more rigorous system vs user input separation could also work
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Nethack procedurally generates a unique dungeon with constraints every time you start a new game and has since 1987.
Randomized according to fixed rules. Now imagine not needing to write those rules / not being bound by them. Consider generative ML coming up with whole new categories of monsters. Consider a Nethack variant that was never told to include a candelabrum or Amulet of Yendor.
Sidenote but AI bot companion for D&D session going "you can't do that in rules" would be funny addition.
It would be interesting experiment to use it to work as NPC characters in one too.
I grew up playing Infocomm games and ChatGPT is nothing like an Infocomm game. They only thing they share is that the UI is based on text. Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT, although ChatGPT "looks" more similar.
Both Infocomm adventures and ChatGPT have a text based interface in which you interact with the software as though you were interacting with a person. You tell the software the outcome you want using natural language and it responds to you in the first person. That is a common UI paradigm.
example: "get the cat then drop the dog then open the door, go west and climb the ladder" - that is a natural language interface, which is what ChatGPT has. In both the Infocomm and ChatGPT case the software will respond to you in the first person as though you were interacting with someone.
>> Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT
This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair. In fact Dragon's Lair was possibly the least interactive of almost all computer games - it was essentially an interactive movie with only the most trivial user interaction.
>> Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next.
This was not my experience of Infocomm adventures.
Is natural language simply mean using words? Is SQL natural language? I think what makes it a natural language is that it follows natural language rules, which Infocomm games surely did not.
Furthermore, Infocomm games used basically 100% precanned responses. It would do the rudimentary things like check if a window was open so if you looked at a wall it might say the window on that wall was open or closed, but that's it. I don't understand how that can make it a natural language interface.
> This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair.
In both games there's a set path you follow. You follow those commands you win, if not, you lose. There's no semantically equivalent way to complete the game.
I remember spending most of my time with Infocomm games doing things like "look around the field" and it telling me "I don't know the word field" -- and I'm screaming because it just told me I'm in an open field! The door is blocked... blocked with what?! You can't answer me that?!
There were a set of commands and objects it wanted you to interact with. That's it. That's not natural language, any more than SQL is. It's a structured language with commands that look like English verbs.
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I think the interactive-dialogue part is a distraction. I think the "new UI paradigm" is defined by goal-orientation, or "outcome specification". So, instead of giving the computer instructions on how to do something, users describe the end goal, and hope for the best, and then finetune the result either by adjusting their request, or by adding explicit commands.
So, in that sense, even if Infocomm games cleverly emulated the dialogue part of ChatGPT, I don't think that was the novel part claimed here.
Think more "Make me an Infocomm-style challenge to solve. Include dragons. Do not include orcs, ogres, or any monster that uses a club."