> Working on an endless crafting game with llama 2
along with a video of this game.
[0] https://nitter.cz/nealagarwal/status/1747284257582506102#m
Mud + water = swamp
Swamp + plant = Venus Flytrap
Okay, okay.
Venus Flytrap + Smoke = smoke detector
<confused smile meme>
Unfortunate. I can see the appeal of using an LLM for this but the results are pretty mediocre.
This is a great result, a branching of water/wood.
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.
And why didn't you do the rest of my examples? ;)
Forest
Fruit
Nuts
This is a Quagmire
Found myself: Thomas the locomotive
- Cactus Missile
- Mammoth Marula
- Super Lizard Wizard
- Cheesethorn Bush
- Cheesnado Lizard Wizard
- Cheesnado 2: Cheesnado Strikes Back
- Cheesewolftrap
Urn
Anyway, once you get that kind of a modifier, anything’s game for megaification.
I'm sure Neal has done hard work in getting it right.
I laughed when "Vindaloo + Bubble" gave me "Burp", and "Burp + No Bacon" gave me "Sad"
Japan + Destruction = Godzilla
Godzilla + Megalodon = Cthulhu
<drops mic>
Mine starts in Atlantis, then Poseidon gives me a fish. Then two fish turned into a shark and I ended up with a sharknado.
Then I found the titanic, we hit an iceberg, I found a treasure and then pirates chased me, but I got away, sold the treasure for money and became the richest man, then climbed Mt Everest, and later had a tea party.
Anyway, there has to be a better way to get fish than Unda da Sea.
That one surprised me.
Sandwich + Sphinx = Sphinxwich
This one delighted me. The Sphinxwich doesn't combine well with other stuff though.
Maple syrup.
Then swamp + fire = dragon
Bacon + Judaism = No Bacon
https://farside.link/https://twitter.com/nealagarwal/status/...
[0]: https://twitter.com/nealagarwal/status/1747284257582506102
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983#issuecomment-191...
Campfire+sushi took about 10 seconds before it gave up and did not combine them.
However, that said, the idea itself is a neat idea, and could quite easily be turned into game ideas somewhere.
As an aside, the game is technically interesting, being a really simple example of using llm generation for game mechanics. But it is not engaging at all and feels nonsensical to me, especially when compared to little alchemy https://littlealchemy2.com/.
I'm not trying to be negative and this isn't a dig on creativity of the wonderful Neal but more points to the immaturity of llms applied to games, maybe to my overexposure to chatgpt, and maybe a prediction that human touch will always be required to make something entertaining. I'm curious how llms will fit into an engaging game experience in the future.
On the other hand, Little Alchemy doesn't have answers to the most basic combinations. Air + Earth = Dust, but Dust doesn't combine with Water. Earth + Water = Mud, but Mud doesn't combine with Air. Earth + Earth = Land, but Land doesn't combine with Fire.
It may be more sensical since it limits combinations to 0.01% of what's possible, but I don't think that makes it more interesting.
You just gotta make a game out of it.
For example challenge yourself to try to craft "pizza".
Can even try to do it in as least number of crafts as possible.
Point is, just crafting random things to see what it spits out is OK, but trying to use your own logic to combine things to get to an arbitrary solution you come up with is much more engaging, at least to me.
Challenge your friends to craft some specific "thing". Think of something you might think could be hard to craft to, and ask them to do the same and see who can get there first, or in the fewest steps.
If you figure each of the things is an input parameter to a LLM this makes a lot of sense. They tend to have short memories and struggle with higher level introspection. Great for demos, but fraught with problems when using them to do real work.
It’s a bit challenging yeah, but me and my friends are challenging each other to get to words and we can usually find a way to make it.
Things like “Godzilla”, “Universe”, “Vampire”, “Optimus Prime”, “Vodka”, etc are just some examples we did.
I don’t seem to be having problems going dozens of levels deep without loops and not running into many query failures. Results that are deep are still making some logical combinational sense to me at least.
Some words we haven’t been able to make, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means we need to get more creative and sometimes think outside the box. There are so many ways you can approach getting to a certain result in my experience so far.
Doing this has been fun and challenging so far for me and my friends FWIW.
So to me it feels like playing against a soulless vector database rather than something engaging and well-crafted. I think what gives me this impression is that things are commonly related to each other using words rather than their meaning -- getting from "pirate" to "captain crunch" to "serial killer" is obviously following lines of language rather than the core concepts that relate objects. This is directly opposed to the actual act of crafting which is 100% rooted in the material world and has no relationship to language.
Maybe I'm losing my imagination, but doing it like you suggest, creating challenges, is makes it more fun. I think I'm just tired of thinking in language.
I'm also seeing a lot of my favorite game creators on twitter enjoying the toy and I'll trust their taste over mine :)