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Comment by Night_Thastus

1 year ago

Tree + Water = river was also pretty baffling.

Unfortunate. I can see the appeal of using an LLM for this but the results are pretty mediocre.

Tree + Water = River

This is a great result, a branching of water/wood.

The rewilding guys would probably say 'that tracks'. Many of their efforts to get rivers to flow year round usually involve trees. Moss, bugs, rodents and grasses first then trees. Usually can help many areas to have year round streams again. As roots help water linger longer in an area. Which leads to streams.

Obviously the prompt to the LLM is just to create the most obvious association. It may not mention "crafting" at all. Maybe it does though. Is there something obvious to craft that uses a tree and water in the process?

  • To design a game like this you need to do a lot better than just creating the obvious association. It needs a mix of obvious recipes and clever recipes, so that there's challenge and a sense of achievement. Also, there's a starting point. What should the graph look like?

    I'm sure Neal has done hard work in getting it right.

Meh, what would be your great response to Tree + Water?

A human can only generate a small fraction of the combinations and would have a hard time coming up with most combinations which are already nonsensical.

What is your non-disappointing idea for, idk, Tears + Pottery (AI: Bowl) or Money + Salt Lick (AI: Cow) or Skull + Lake (AI: Loch Ness) or Dracula + Pirate (AI: Vampirate) or Curse + Money (AI: Debt)? Now do that thousands of more times.

The infinite aspect is the thing that keeps it interesting, I think. The fun is getting a new, weird result like "Dracula" and "Pot of Gold" and seeing if you can generate new weird results from the existing set.