[HN Gopher] Oasis: A Universe in a Transformer
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       Oasis: A Universe in a Transformer
        
       Author : gadtfly
       Score  : 95 points
       Date   : 2024-10-31 22:10 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (oasis-model.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (oasis-model.github.io)
        
       | gadtfly wrote:
       | Playable demo: https://oasis.decart.ai/starting-point
        
       | jerpint wrote:
       | This is a very impressive demo, this seems very early in a what
       | might in hindsight be an "obvious" direction to take transformers
       | towards
        
       | pona-a wrote:
       | See previous discussion:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014650
       | 
       | 81 comments, 241 points.
        
         | skerit wrote:
         | This is such a cool experiment, and those comments basically
         | boil down to "Lol, it's just minecraft"
        
           | throwaway314155 wrote:
           | Welcome to hacker news. Home of the shallow dismissal.
        
             | Fuzzwah wrote:
             | I could knock up clone of these shallow dismissals in a
             | weekend.
        
       | stevedekorte wrote:
       | How are state changes consistently tracked?
        
         | NBJack wrote:
         | What you see is what you get. Build a house, but turn away from
         | it, and it may disappear. Everything seems to be tracked from a
         | few previous frames.
        
         | nurettin wrote:
         | They are not, and probably never will be. Looking up at the sky
         | regenerates your surroundings. Inventory is less tricky, you
         | just feed it back as input, but it is so easy to lose the
         | landscape.
        
         | RedNifre wrote:
         | The context window seems to be about one second long at ca 20
         | FPS, so you get enough state change to do realistic things like
         | accelerated falling.
        
       | mnky9800n wrote:
       | Everyone will shit on this while the authors will get a 20m
       | valuation and walk away with their lives set.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | The most fun thing about this demo (and the demo is 100% worth
       | trying out, you'll need to use Chrome for it) is that it shows
       | how there's no persistent memory at all. If you get bored of the
       | area you are in, look straight up at the sky and look down again.
       | If you see something interesting - like a fence post - keep that
       | in your field of vision and you should start to see more
       | similarly interesting things.
        
         | bob1029 wrote:
         | This also works in Safari on my iPhone.
        
         | mparrett wrote:
         | This gesture would often work for me in lucid dreams-- look
         | away to refresh content. And when I played video games more
         | regularly, my dreams would take on a procedurally generated
         | quality that always struck me as more than the typical abstract
         | dream imagery. It was as if my mind had learned a basic game
         | engine with mechanics, physics and various rendering
         | techniques.
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | Also because of the limitations of this model to achieve
         | something in AI Minecraft is completely different than the
         | standard game, for example to go to the Nether is easier to
         | find the red mushroom texture and use it to confuse the AI into
         | thinking it's netherrack, same think for the end by using sand
         | blocks or similar color blocks.
        
       | majormajor wrote:
       | A while back "deformable terrain" and walls you could destroy and
       | such was a big buzzword in games. AFAICT, though, it's rarely
       | been used in truly open-ended ways, vs specific "there are things
       | behind some of these walls, or buried under this mound" type of
       | stuff. Generally there are still certain types of environment
       | objects that let you do certain things, and many more that let
       | you do nothing.
       | 
       | Generative AI could be an interesting approach to the issue of
       | solving the "what happens if you destroy [any particular
       | element]" aspect.
       | 
       | For a lot of games you'd probably still want to have specific
       | destinations set in the map; maybe now it's just much more open-
       | ended as far as how you get there (like some of the ascend-
       | through-matter stuff in Tears of the Kingdom, but more open-ended
       | in a "just start trying to dig anywhere" way and you use gen AI
       | to figure out exactly how much dirt/other material will get piled
       | up for digging in a specific place?).
       | 
       | Or for games with more of an emphasis on random drops, or random
       | maps, you could leverage some of the randomness more directly.
       | Could be really cool for a roguelike.
        
         | talldayo wrote:
         | You can still scale up the Power Game/Noita mindset to larger
         | games, with pretty good results. _Teardown_ is a very fun
         | current-gen title that combines physics and voxels to create a
         | sort of fully physical world to interact with:
         | https://youtu.be/SDfWDB1hGWc
         | 
         | There's still a ways to go, but I don't really think AI will be
         | required if game engine pipelines extend PBR to destruction
         | physics. The biggest bottleneck is frankly the performance hit
         | it would entail, and the dynamic lighting that is inherently
         | required.
        
       | islewis wrote:
       | This looks like a very similar project to "Diffusion Models Are
       | Real-Time Game Engines"[1] that circulated on HN a few months ago
       | [2], which was playing DOOM. There's some pretty interesting
       | commentary on that post that might also apply to this.
       | 
       | I'd like to do a deeper dive into the two approaches, but on a
       | surface level one interesting note is Oasis specifically mentions
       | using a use-specific ASIC (presumably for inference?):
       | 
       | > When Etched's transformer ASIC, Sohu, is released, we can run
       | models like Oasis in 4K.
       | 
       | [1] https://gamengen.github.io/
       | 
       | [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41375548
        
       | kookamamie wrote:
       | It looks like noise with hardly any permanence. Seems like a
       | electricity -heavy way of solving "gameplay", if you can call it
       | that.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-05 23:01 UTC)