80 Level: AI Simulation Platform Where Characters Make Their Own Decisions

So, if you want the NPCs to be able to take over a town hall after the mayor has went off the rails (or some equally unexpected event that makes all the possible planning worthwhile), you'll still need a system that keeps track of it all: Who the mayor is, that there is a mayor, there is a town hall, that you can perform a coup in this specific world, the specific ways in which the NPCs can participate in the coup, etc. If you generate all of this completely procedurally, you'll end up with the NPCs falling out of sync with each other when you have a bunch of them going about their days.

After you've created a sensible database for keeping track of the current world state, character states, character relations, possible character actions, character needs, etc, doesn't that end up adding to something that would work almost equally as well without the LLM? Although LLMs are extremely powerful tool for free text input into that system on the player's end, even if you're just getting the embeddings of that text and hooking that up to a cosine similarity search of pregenerated NPC responses.

Of course, this is still modeled in the first order for things like enemies not seeing you in stealth games, or police not alerted if nobody sees the crime.

In reality, each agent models the world and makes judgments based on what they’ve seen first hand, what they’ve heard, and deductive reasoning.

It would be interesting if game AI was modeled on first principles from incentives, direct observations, and (with human agents) what they’ve been told multiplied by how much they trust the person. Doesn’t require general purpose reasoning, and could still rely on a set of simplistic game world events and actions. The hope is this would lead to varied and unique experiences through emergent behavior, eg:

- An enemy that observed you use an extremely powerful weapon would be more cautious of you, but not others.

- Hurting an npc without being detected can cause them to accuse and retaliate against an innocent person nearby.

- Lying to someone in dialog about an event they observed directly would be contradictory and thus they would not trust you.

- Hurting neutral NPCs without killing them can lead to negative rumors spreading topologically, based on your physical appearance

- … so if you change your appearance you can be anonymous, but not towards the direct observer, which will recognize your face.

Anyway, rambling. But this type of theory of mind stuff seems reachable and kind of fun. At least the first order modeling (for npcs who don’t use language), would be a lot simpler. Once you get into “they don’t know that I know Q, so I can lie about X to achieve Y”, things can get quite complicated.

Recently there was a bunch of viral videos about Claude 3 being sentient because it self-referenced during a needle-in-a-haystack test. I would like to know what happens when players inevitably try to make these game agents self-aware.