[HN Gopher] Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games
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Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games
Author : eversowhatev
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-01-03 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gwern.net)
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm an AI dungeon subscriber, and what I like about it is that it
| reacts to whatever I can think of to say. If it was mostly
| predefined options, I'd probably not be interested in it: there
| are plenty of interactive fiction games already, and they're
| crafted by humans and generally better-written than what AID
| could ever come up with. Personally, I enjoy the looseness, how
| you have to kind of hold the AI's hand and steer the scene
| yourself. I doubt I'm representative of most people, but I think
| the number of people who would pay for a CYOA text adventure game
| is pretty low anyway. Latitude might as well stick with weirdos
| like me for awhile, and pray that the overhead costs come down.
| BariumBlue wrote:
| I didn't personally enjoy AI dungeon too much because of how
| loose it felt - nothing was defined and anything goes - but I
| hear people describe it like you did, and it sounds similar to
| how I heard lucid dreaming described - you're simultaneously
| driving but also part of the experience.
| fractal618 wrote:
| This is amazing!! I have to get back to work now, but this is
| very very cool!
|
| here's the first 5 minutes of my adventure:
|
| Pick a setting... Apocalyptic
|
| Select a character... Courier
|
| You are Chris, a courier trying to survive in a post apocalyptic
| world by scavenging among the ruins of what is left. You have a
| parcel of letters and a small pistol. It's a long and dangerous
| road from Boston to Charleston, but you're one of the only people
| who knows the roads well enough to get your parcel of letters
| there. You set out in the morning and hope to have it in your
| hands by the time the sun goes down, or else you know you'll
| never get it there.
|
| You walk down the road and realize that you must be close to the
| highway. You hold the parcel of letters in your hands and read
| them.
|
| Dear Chris, It's time for you to get to Charleston. The old man
| was insistent on this, so you'll be making the trip. You search
| for a vehicle.
|
| You walk onto the highway and look for a vehicle for yourself.
| After a time, you see one in the distance, a small hatchback. You
| check if the small hatchback is operational.
|
| You walk over to the small hatchback and look inside. It looks
| like it has never been used, and the interior is very clean. You
| open the door and climb inside. You use the relative position of
| the rising sun to orient yourself and drive south.
|
| You turn the key and start the small car. It sounds like a lawn
| mower and comes to life with a burst of smoke. It purrs to life
| and you back out of the crowded parking lot. You continue driving
| south.
|
| You drive down the road, glancing at the fuel gauge as you go. It
| seems to indicate half a tank, which seems unlikely, but you
| cannot be sure. You continue driving south and look for fuel.
|
| You continue driving south and look for fuel at every station.
| You come up empty at each one. It is a long and boring drive, and
| you find yourself staring at the ceiling of the car more and more
| often. courier Created: Jan 3rd 2022 at 4:20PM Updated: Jan 3rd
| 2022 at 4:26PM Actions: 14 0 You are Chris, a courier trying to
| survive in a post apocalyptic world by scavenging among the ruins
| of what is left. You have a parcel of letters and a small pistol.
| It's a long and dangerous road from Boston to Charleston, but
| you're one of the only people who knows the roads well enough to
| get your parcel of letters there. You set out in the morning and
| hope to have it in your hands by the time the sun goes down, or
| else you know you'll never get it there.
|
| You walk down the road and realize that you must be close to the
| highway.
|
| > You hold the parcel of letters in your hands and read them.
|
| Dear Chris, It's time for you to get to Charleston. The old man
| was insistent on this, so you'll be making the trip.
|
| > You search for a vehicle.
|
| You walk onto the highway and look for a vehicle for yourself.
| After a time, you see one in the distance, a small hatchback.
|
| > You check if the small hatchback is operational.
|
| You walk over to the small hatchback and look inside. It looks
| like it has never been used, and the interior is very clean. You
| open the door and climb inside.
|
| > You use the relative position of the rising sun to orient
| yourself and drive south.
|
| You turn the key and start the small car. It sounds like a lawn
| mower and comes to life with a burst of smoke. It purrs to life
| and you back out of the crowded parking lot.
|
| > You continue driving south.
|
| You drive down the road, glancing at the fuel gauge as you go. It
| seems to indicate half a tank, which seems unlikely, but you
| cannot be sure.
|
| > You continue driving south and look for fuel.
|
| You continue driving south and look for fuel at every station.
| You come up empty at each one. It is a long and boring drive, and
| you find yourself staring at the ceiling of the car more and more
| often. View Adventure Ai Dungeon Logo
| dfabulich wrote:
| In this article, Gwern proposes replacing AI Dungeon's free-text
| parser with a menu of CYOA options. I don't think it will work,
| at least not with the current generation GPT-3.
|
| GPT-3 won't be able to generate a good CYOA until it can generate
| a good non-interactive novel. Today, GPT-3 can generate text, so
| you _could_ try to use it to generate a whole novel. People have,
| but the novels it generates aren 't worth reading.
|
| "CYOAs" are interactive novels. I run a company, Choice of Games,
| that publishes hand-written interactive novels. Our novels use
| hidden state to provide an experience that's longer, richer, and
| deeper than traditional paper-based CYOA books. (The author of
| TFA links to one of our blog posts in the footer of this article.
| https://www.choiceofgames.com/2011/07/by-the-numbers-how-to-... )
|
| Our approach is to pay professional authors to write these
| interactive novels. (And we have professional editors who read
| and edit their work.)
|
| Could we use GPT-3 to avoid paying professional authors? No, of
| course not. Writing an interactive novel with interesting,
| dramatic choices is _harder_ than writing a non-interactive
| novel, and GPT-3 can 't even do _that_.
|
| The feature that makes AI Dungeon interesting and unique is its
| ability to improvise in response to player's actions. Presenting
| a pre-computed menu of options is what hand-written interactive
| novels already do; to succeed, it would have to compete with
| hand-written interactive novels on quality.
|
| In other words, when GPT-3 computes an entire novel, it's
| indistinguishable to the reader from a (bad) hand-written novel.
| If AI Dungeon were to auto-generate an interactive novel,
| particularly in the way Gwern describes here, with the choices
| already pre-computed and crowdsourced in advance, the result
| would be indistinguishable from a (bad) hand-written interactive
| novel.
|
| I think it's possible that if some future generation of GPT could
| generate a good-enough novel, then it could also generate a good-
| enough interactive novel, but this thing has gotta learn how to
| crawl before it can learn how to walk.
| jerf wrote:
| I think what Gwern is proposing is perhaps better seen by you
| as an optimization for the current AID rather than a "true"
| CYOA novel implementation. Because most of what you said
| applies to AID as well. I toyed with it a bit, but even short
| snippets of text are often incoherent and I have to give it a
| lot of grace to operate. In particular, while I don't
| necessarily mind the way it'll just introduce a new character,
| I don't like the way they disappear equally quickly and without
| fanfare.
|
| While AID's nominal attraction is the ability to react to
| anything, I think based on the evidence only a small percentage
| of the users end up using it that way. (It's possible they're
| all the _long term_ users, in which case they are important,
| but I still think it 's a small proportion of the users.) The
| vast majority of the users the vast majority of the time will
| be selecting from a small handful of options that would
| constitute the vast majority of responses.
|
| To the extent you'd find the resulting CYOA rather unappealing,
| I'd say the current AID is pretty much unappealing in exactly
| the same way, for exactly the same reasons, and given that AID
| hasn't exactly taken the world by storm I imagine this is the
| majority view. (Though it may have the sort of inner core rabid
| fanbase that you can still build on as a business.)
| semperdark wrote:
| Amazing who you run into on this site. In High School (~2010
| on) I played through your games as fast as you could make them.
| Thanks for the hours!
| tveita wrote:
| With a branching factor of 5 it won't take long before every
| person playing has made an unique sequence of choices, so I don't
| think caching would help you as much as you'd think. You could
| maybe cheaply serve the people who try a couple of decisions and
| then get bored.
|
| It could make a good landing page though - play for 10 steps and
| then spring the "subscribe to continue your adventure".
| cjauvin wrote:
| Many years ago I did some experimentation with the idea of
| slapping a very crude "parser" (no AI involved, just extremely
| basic string matching) on top of a Lone Wolf CYOA book which was
| made public via Project Aon [0]. I wrote about it here [1], and
| the result is still playable here [2].
|
| [0] https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books
|
| [1] https://github.com/cjauvin/gamebook.js
|
| [2] https://projectaon.org/staff/christian/gamebook.js/
| varelse wrote:
| You would have to retrain the model to incorporate a global
| context if you wanted to get a coherent adventure / DMing
| experience out of it. Once the text tokens (256-2048 depending on
| the model I believe) go out of scope, they are no longer used for
| future responses. There's no reason you couldn't build a model
| around an encoding of a coherent world and then let the GPT part
| assemble the prose other than actually training and designing
| such a model. If no man's sky can do procedural worlds, I see no
| reason why you couldn't do the same thing for text adventures.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| I think people are in agreement with this conceptually, and the
| challenge is figuring out how to effectively implement it. I'd
| certainly love to see a hybrid like this with a coherent world
| model, but for example, how do you avoid the existing
| challenges with procedural worlds where you're basically
| limited to combinatorial combinations of a small number of
| primitive features? If the free-form text can't affect more
| than toggling of predetermined procedural state combinations,
| it's basically just an interface to a traditional world sim
| with more window dressing.
| varelse wrote:
| I would start with a rogue-like game and the hard part
| becomes generating the training data to describe in
| beautifully flowing prose what happens on a per move basis.
| Enter your patient friend who offers to do this and has run
| lots of campaigns previously.
|
| It seems like something that could be trained starting with
| an existing GPT model and specialized to this task to me, but
| I'm just brain farting here. And by all means steal this idea
| if you're so inclined.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| It seems like the hardest part isn't world model -> prose
| (still hard tbc), but prose -> world model. There have been
| games for a long time that let you interact with a world
| model via simple verb + object statements (e.g. "get key",
| "search chest"), but the power of GPT3-style AI dungeons
| isn't just that it handles longer, more natural text input,
| it's that there are no restrictions on the (short-term,
| incoherent) world model they use to generate responses. If
| you want to "throw key at the biggest goblin", you'll get a
| response that's coherent (in the short term) instead of an
| error saying that you can't do that with keys.
|
| When you pair a better, prosier text input-response system
| with a procedural world model, if the procedural world
| model is built like existing ones you'll still have to deal
| with restrictions in the world's content and the valid
| interactions between constituents. At which point all that
| fancy AI makes for a more natural parser but doesn't add
| any richness to the game world, which is the thing we'd
| like to get at.
|
| If anyone has ideas for how to solve the prose -> world
| model problem, that could be super fun and rewarding to
| work on, probably so much so that they wouldn't be sharing
| them here :(
| proser wrote:
| There's a really interesting cross-over here with
| literary structure. You need to teach a model to
| recognize tone, theme, and setting in addition to world
| "facts."
|
| What makes a world like Westeros different than the Shire
| isn't just facts like "seasons are really long" but
| elements of tension, political unrest, and the outlook of
| the people who inhabit it. To do this effectively, you
| need to be building simulations of literary works.
| There's always going to be an art to this, but instead of
| the manuscript, it's going to be about the parts of the
| model.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| I think in the context of natural language for game
| worlds, "prose" is targeting the much lower bar of
| something that sounds like a human might write it, vs
| like "you PLACED KEY in THE LEFT DOOR. Proceed to A
| STAIRCASE" from games of yore. Understanding the much
| richer space of literary prose, such as the difference
| between the Shire and Westeros, seems like a harder
| problem, but also one that might be well suited for
| existing NLP training pipelines, because you can label a
| large amount of text with only a few descriptors. It
| might be tough to come to a consensus amongst literary
| experts what those descriptors should be, but e.g. if
| LOTR book 1 is "pastoral" and ASOIAF book 1 is "gritty",
| you've now got a lot of text associated to each of those
| labels. I wonder if anyone is working on this?
| varelse wrote:
| SHRDLU was a simple world you could manipulate with
| English prose back in the 1960s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
|
| Unless you feel you need flowery expressive input as well
| as output. But do we really need input more sophisticated
| than that of Zork here?
| drdeca wrote:
| Maybe "an interface to a traditional world sim with more
| window dressing", is all you need?
|
| Especially if the traditional world sim is fairly rich itself
| (not like, as rich as the most rich that had been made
| before, but still decent), and the way the GPT part connects
| to it is good enough.
| angrais wrote:
| I'm wondering how everyone else felt browsing this website, and
| using links in particular?
|
| For me, on mobile, they open (I assume) inside an iframe or such,
| which is counter to how standard links work. This made it really
| frustrating for me to use. The content seems interesting overall,
| but I gave up due to how links work. Ridiculous, I know.
| ricree wrote:
| I'm reasonably confident I've seen a cyoa implemented like this
| get posted to HN, but I can't find the link offhand.
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