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Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

I get it is fun to play for an hour or so then you inexorably encounter behaviors that are too complex to handle, e.g. you try to sneak in on an enemy but get spotted because the dog started talking or barking randomly, then suddenly wonder how much "it" actually gets it. You then start with less and less complex plans... until you realize that direct commands or shortcuts are more reliable.

I do think it is an interesting exploration but the jagged frontier makes it really challenging to know what will consistently work and what will not, to the point that I bet (maybe pessimistically) one will be gradually less daring with creative plan with their "companion" simply because they can't trust it.

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I feel like that's the benefit to the creator having made this a dog (even if a demon-possessed dog). As intelligent as a dog can be, can we ever truly understand why they do the things they do?

The Uncanny Valley effect would be too big if a human companion randomly started talking to you while you were sneaking up on an enemy. But a dog? You'd be pissed off at it for a bit, and then forgive it because it's a dog.

"But a dog? You'd be pissed off at it for a bit, and then forgive it because it's a dog."

Some grumpy old school hunters (in less civilized areas) would literally shoot such a dog though for barking in the wrong moment.

Except it is not a dog. It is an AI. It’s a character in the game.

People often love to fus ro dah Skyrim companions off of cliffs because they can be incompetent annoying little dumb things that won’t shut up.

The character taking on canine form won’t suddenly make gamers more likely to put up with it messing about their gameplay. Thats just not how things work.

> The character taking on canine form won’t suddenly make gamers more likely to put up with it messing about their gameplay. Thats just not how things work.

source?

So, this is what I have been thinking (and part of the reason why I want to "cook" it more before shipping). Since I have been building it for so long, I am not sure how much "overfit" it is on my data, the way I speak and the phrases I 'm using.

And of course the opposite too, how much the dog trained me to speak to it a certain way to maximize outcome success.

But then I thought, when people play games they are not using highly sophisticated vocabulary and there is probably lots of repetition since they are always under some form of multi-tasking stress (playing and replying/speaking). So maybe... maybe, the system can adjust itself. Use a big LLM offline to say "user said X, we did Y - was that good?" - then retrain itself.

The decomposer is basically a bunch of old-school embeddings/classifiers stitched together, it can train super fast and doesn't need tons of data. Could the thing calibrate itself to the user? Does it even need to? (because as I said I 'm a datapoint of 1 and I am not ready for the potentially huge stream of bug reports when I ship (add some perfectionism to the mix and you get the idea)).

edit: typos

That's absolutely my thought too.

When watching the vids, I remembered talking (mostly text chat) in MMORPG's 20 years ago. Even when we started using Skype, etc., chatting was frequently short, slang, and quick info. Like, "pulling", "OTM", "BRB", "OOM". Or even just "let's go", and so on.

But with some practice sessions, I suspect this system would pretty quickly gravitate to using any players slang speech. Am I wrong?

Kinda in the same vein, been reading/listening to Dungeon Crawler Carl lately. One of the main characters is a tortoise shell cat that gains sentience. One of the more fun aspects in the early books is the main character Carl dealing with that cat being loud, not aware of her surroundings, and making it difficult to sneak around an RPG style dungeon.

Also the author really gets the "tortitude" right.

Princess Donut has insane CHA, sneaking is not the move. Just have her run in and charm everybody.

Yeah makes sense this is what I said about AI and coding. No way it could do anything complex.

Now AI does all the coding for me, I couldn’t have been more wrong. You will be wrong too.

Yeah, so the dog is derpy today, but the possibilities in the future are going to be awesome.

Indeed. Can’t wait until they sell me a subscription to a game that I will just look at while an AI plays and has fun for me. Whee! Awesome times ahead indeed.

Or maybe it won’t play the game for me but will do whatever it wants, mess up about my gameplay because it inferred it should do something I did not order it to do.

Either way, awesome! Lovely gaming experience. I remember being a kid and thinking “wouldn’t it be so much more fun it if I didn’t have to actually play the game?”.

> Can’t wait until they sell me a subscription to a game that I will just look at while an AI plays and has fun for me

"Twitch"

you lack imagination. AI will not play the game for you.

It will construct the game around you as you play. It will customize the game according to you and the situation dynamically.

The first step is AI npcs and AI generated quest lines.

The next step is the entire world, the entire story, the entire game will be dynamically constructed as soon as you start it up.

This. Far too many people let their pessimism get in the way of possibilities and imagination.

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