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Comment by aschearer | Hacker News Reader

Programmers always want to automate content creation. I get it as I’m a coder and it’s a fun problem space. Plus creating content is super time and skill intensive. It’s really hard to get right in my experience. Kind of like trying to automate writing a novel…

OK I read the article. I'm very skeptical of this approach. I doubt we can actually uncover fitness functions that reliably maps to "fun", and I believe it would require huge engineering effort to keep the game "simulable." Their examples aren't convincing. What would be convincing is a full, complex, and _fun_ game using these techniques.

Also the article seems like an ad for their AI solution.

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> Programmers always want to automate content creation

We have a god complex that brain surgeons can only envy. How many universes have they built?

I suspect everyone on HN started out wanting to build COOL WORLDS as a kid!

I still do :)

I wouldn’t say it was an inspiration, no

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_World_(SNES_video_game)

> I doubt we can actually uncover fitness functions that reliably maps to "fun"

You don't have to. Get empirical data and form a proxy evaluator. Usable enough for most evolutionary algorithms. I've done this sort of stuff for very subjective metrics and actually sold something with it.

> Kind of like trying to automate writing a novel…

So you are saying procedural level design could be solved with generative AI?

In theory. It'll be more convincing once generative AI proves itself useful for writing novels.

AI can already write short stories, just not very good ones. It'll be doing novels once the context windows are big enough.

Agreed, the technology looks promising but isn't ready yet.

It's orders of magnitude better than procedural methods written by humans.

At writing novels or creating games? I'm open to evidence of either...

At writing novels. So potentially also at procedural level design.

I'm admittedly skeptical. The AI generated novels I've seen have been bad. Really really bad. It's been a few months, however, so maybe the landscape has evolved faster than I expected.

Is there a source you can recommend for further reading?

Which novels? Did you compare them to novels created by handcrafted algorithms? I guarantee you, what you have read wasn't bad, it was fantastically good, compared to anything a software could have come up with without machine learning. So it seems likely that traditional procedural level generation could also be far outperformed by AI systems.

> procedural methods written by humans

I did not understand what you intended here, but I see what you mean. I totally agree that these are the algorithms to beat.

I'd argue that procedural methods should also include human writing processes, which to date have produced the best output.

I assume the technology will get there eventually.

Note also that base models (foundation models) are much better at writing fiction than models tuned for chat. See https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/706441900479152128/no...

I've been able to write coherent stories a dozen pages long. You need to have it generate plot points and other auxiliary information about characters and whatnot and it does a pretty good job. Obviously it's not going to one shot all that yet.

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