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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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?

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?

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.

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