Hacker News Reader

Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

Games like this already exist and have comparable complexity, so calling it infinite and using an LLM backend feels overhyped.

For example, Castle + Fortress = Castle?

City + Town = Castle. Castle + Wall = City?

Metropolis + City = Megalopolis. Ok we're getting somewhere cool here, let's see how big it gets: Megalopolis + City = Metropolis?!

Finally, it just failed to combine War + Tunnel. It blinks for a minute and then gives up. I would have said "Sappers"? Edit: There are actually many such failures for higher-order combinations which is strictly not infinite. Other combinations described above might technically fit the bill but ceasing functionality does not : /

View on HN

I just described it to my colleagues as

> this uses GenAI in order to attempt being truly infinite, or at least not bounded by their ability to design and input combinations themselves

It's fair to go for that name imho. Not strictly correct, but 100% fair.

That's just generative or procedural though. It's ok of course that it's not truly infinite, I'm just posting because it was disappointingly finite. There were concepts I was trying to build up to that simply didn't exist. So I'm not even sure if it's less bounded than human design, just less manual effort to build.

All I'm saying really is, if it had just been called "AI Generative Craft" I would have had nothing to say in the comments. I would have gotten what I expected.

>There were concepts I was trying to build up to that simply didn't exist.

They may not, but that you didn't find them precisely where you expected doesn't really convince me that they don't.

Couldn't build up to doesn't mean they didn't exist... it took me a while to make a "Sandwich". But after spending enough (too much) time with it, I was able to construct some things that show it's not disappointingly finite:

* "Bollygraff"

* "Teen Mom 12"

* "Hackimus Prime"

* "Billionaire King + Sushi Burger Venus" (sic)

One potentially frustrating part is that some things turn out to be black holes... for example, combine "Trump" with anything and it tends to return "Trump". There are also plenty of loops, and some that refuse to combine at all.

You can combine Trump with the Empire State Building to get Trump Tower. Also I think Trump + Money was Bankruptcy. And there's Trumpthuluh obviously.

I got

Rich + Rich = Richer

Richer + Richer = Richest

Richest + Poop = Trump

O got trump by making "god"+"a-hole"

Then I did "T-Rex"+"trump" and I got "T-Rump"

I was impressed by the creativity

I forget how I got Trump (it was a different formulation than others mentioned though). But Trump + Titanic = Sinking Ship

I've found retrying after a bit will often return the new result. I suspect the frontend is timing out before the backend comes up with a result, which is eventually cached by the time of the second attempt

Others have mentioned the same - I tried several times the same combination and got no result. However, it's now clear from other replies that eventually there will be some result (even if it's just one of the inputs), so I guess that argument doesn't hold.

I mean, there are only a finite number of words in the English language, so of course something like this isn't truly infinite.

But I've wandered off into a space of fantastical creatures: rainbow + explosion = unicorn, from there I've gotten phoenix, "steam unicorn", narwhalicorn.

Others have gotten into food items? I don't even know how I'd get there. And you've gotten into infrastructure and war.

There's enough to explore here that I'm ok with it being called infinite.

not the OP but as a fun exploratory hobby project, you don't think the presentation is reasonable? seems totally fair to me

I mean, not really, no. I'm not trying to be super critical here, just, it's not even presented as a exploratory LLM project. It's only presented as "infinite", and it's... not.

> There are actually many such failures for higher-order combinations which is strictly not infinite

I suspect a service error, either the service/LLM not responding fast enough sometimes when a combination isn't already known, or the LLM not giving a usable result.

I mean, there aren't infinite emojis or words so it isn't gonna be infinite but I think some of the errors I've seen have been more transient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com