← Back to context

Comment by smarkov

1 year ago

I couldn't find any information but does this use some kind of LLM to derive the combinations from? It makes a request to the backend every time you combine items which sometimes takes >500ms, and also supports some really wild combinations that I highly doubt someone has taken the time to come up with. It would also explain why the icons are emoji's, it would be fairly trivial to ask ChatGPT to give you the result of Fire + Water and an accompanying emoji.

You are correct according to this tweet [0]. That may become inaccessible as Nitter dies, but the text is:

> Working on an endless crafting game with llama 2

along with a video of this game.

[0] https://nitter.cz/nealagarwal/status/1747284257582506102#m

  • Ahh, neat application of it. Explains the somewhat dubious combinations I was seeing.

    • Forest + fire = smoke

      Mud + water = swamp

      Swamp + plant = Venus Flytrap

      Okay, okay.

      Venus Flytrap + Smoke = smoke detector

      <confused smile meme>

      81 replies →

    • I think it’s the first time AI has made me chuckle. I ended up with “Riddle”, so I combined that with “Tornado” and it gave me “Twister” which I thought was a great Christmas Cracker pun, and then when I combined Riddle with “Bottle” it gave me “Genie”.

    • Here’s all the combinations I’ve came up with so far: Swamp + Mud = Quagmire Divorce + God = Odd Sun + Hourglass = Time Glass + Hourglass = Time Ice + Oasis = Penguin Sand + Stone = Pyramid Mirage + Time = Illusion Dinosaur + Lightning = Godzilla Oasis + Water = Mirage Egg + Time = chicken Golem + tide = Titan Titan + time = Chronos Poseidon + lighting = Zeus Titan + Chronos = Cronus Time + Fire = Sun Sun * Titan = Apollo Ash + Mud = Clay Godzilla + Love = God ? + ? = Spongebob Unicorn+Gold=Alchemy Unicorn+Alchemy = Philosopher’s Stone Gold+Alchemy=Midas swamp+chicken=duck duck+roast=goose goose+goose=flock flock+wind=flight Narwhal+time=unicorn Lightning + Treasure = lots of stuff (Rich, idk Narwhal+unicorn=narwhalicorn Jonah+time=narwhal Whale+oasis=jonah Plant+seed=tree noah+ark=flood curse+jesus=cross bank+intrest=money dandelion+cactus=desert Back to the future+riddle=time travel back to the future+time=delorian Desert+indiana jones=tresure

      5 replies →

  • Off topic, why is nitter dying? I've noticed the main instance's SSL cert is down for a bit now, and other instances are pretty rate limited. Did something happen/change?

  • Neat.

    Campfire+sushi took about 10 seconds before it gave up and did not combine them.

    • The request looks like "https://neal.fun/api/infinite-craft/pair?first=Phoenix&secon..." so it's probably typically caching the combination of phoenix+seeds but if there is no cache entry it would use llama to make up something. If there's a lot of attention on the site the llm service might be down or overloaded. And given the exponential/factoral (?) amount of combinations this may be reached surprisingly quickly. Just a guess.

      As an aside, the game is technically interesting, being a really simple example of using llm generation for game mechanics. But it is not engaging at all and feels nonsensical to me, especially when compared to little alchemy https://littlealchemy2.com/.

      I'm not trying to be negative and this isn't a dig on creativity of the wonderful Neal but more points to the immaturity of llms applied to games, maybe to my overexposure to chatgpt, and maybe a prediction that human touch will always be required to make something entertaining. I'm curious how llms will fit into an engaging game experience in the future.

      5 replies →

    • There's tons of combinations that take forever and nothing ends up happening. That's how I got around to the comment thread (clean+satan is why I'm here): I'm waiting for the latest combination to time out

      2 replies →

An LLM seems like overkill for a project like this. Why not word2vec?

The dumbness of the LLM inference ruined this for me. Fossil + Fire = Dinosaur? Okay.

  • it also get's caught in stupid loops.

    this game is fun for a bit, but shallow once you realize the gimmick.

    you can go completely random bullshit go and get "super cyberwolfman zombie phoenixman" that's nonsense, of course it's "first discovery!"

Wouldnt it be worth caching the results? For the first couple of million combinations at least. I suppose that would take away some level of serendipity. But I imagine it would make this a lot cheaper, considering its popularity.

I thought they were using some kind of vector space searches like embedding.. no idea if that's the case

  • Yeah I'm pretty sure you could do this just with the classic word embeddings (king =queen + man - woman). Maybe it doesn't work as well as with a full LLM.

    • Addition won't work for things that depend on the order of operations. If salt + water is ocean and water + fire is steam, what's salt + water + fire? Is it salt + steam or ocean + fire?

      Associativity and commutivity in vector addition doesn't translate well to semantic meaning. Extrapolating your example, it'd also mean:

          v_king  - v_queen   ~= v_father  - v_mother
          v_king  - v_royalty ~= v_father  - v_parent
          v_king  - v_father  ~= v_royalty - v_parent ~= v_queen - v_mother
      

      I don't see why those should all be true. Intuitively, trying to satisfy O(N^2) semantic pairings with vectors that are optimised for a very specific and different numerical operation (cosine similarity) feels like something that won't work. I'd imagine errors get amplified with 3+ operands.

      3 replies →

I knew this was powered by an LLM once I crafted both "seahorse" and "sea horse"

  • For me it was when one of my early combinations of Pegasus (might also have been unicorn or flying horse, the latter already being a duplicate of Pegasus) and water became hippocampus, but with the hippopotamus emoji ().

    I'm sure it was fun for the creator, bit I'll stick with non - AI games for now.

  • i really hate it when you are crafting something and get the same thing as another thing in your side bar but it has one CAPITAL LETTER!!! like what that dosnt change anything you fuggly rat

    • Yes Jimmy I feel the same way say if you have fence and prison it becomes fence I

      rag just because of it.