hnedeotes

I might be wrong but what I was thinking was that in chess (or even imperfect information games with a much smaller "range" such as Stratego,) a model can calculate all possibilities for all moves and following moves, by itself and opponent up to a depth that the human cannot. So it can see everything that can happen if it does move X-Y, then Y-Z, then A-C and figure out one that is unbeatable no matter what (or at worse leads to a draw).

But on MtG in particular that never really applies in full due to drawing new cards. You can play perfectly and still lose due to sheer randomness of draws.

The latent space I'm not sure how it translates to a game playing bot, but I would imagine that it would open it up to fail in the same ways a human fails.

On the game I'm designing it could do that (calculate all possibilities up to X depth, for all possible scrolls and table states) but it would be extremely expensive to do so (not a very good argument if compute power keeps increasing), but more than that, in contrast to something like chess, there can be many more paths and decision points where a bad decision turns into a loss, so if it assumes that the best play is X at some point, a sequence that it discarded due to not being the most probable can exist and the bot can never be sure, so if it makes a decision that plays into a "trap" he can't undo to a favourable position. While in Chess it's much clearer what is possible from a given state, it's unambiguous and the rules are fairly limited.

In stratego you have a 10x10 board game, a very clear objective and at most 40 pieces (with repeated pieces and simple mechanics amongst them), while in MtG and similar games a single piece (card) can have probably hundreds of different interactions depending on everything else going (and everything else hidden), at many points of decision. In stratego it also seems that for humans at least, most moves are "inconsequential", as it probably plays more at the psychological/bluff level. Maybe a human player that was given the same budget for training could spend a month training against bots might fare better as the strategies might be then better understood (by the article it's mentioned that the agent recovered from bad positions, so it seems that it was mostly human error, as the human was playing better up to that point).

While on MtG or Asummon, although there can be inconsequential moves (they don't matter given the context/stage of the game), every move carries with it a possibility of being consequential in unpredictable ways. Anyway, there should be ways of training models with just a rule abiding client for these games, without codifying all rules, that they can just keep playing to figure out the interactions, so if that theory is true then it should be possible to create an unbeatable bot - I'm just not sure it is without infinite time/compute and less so if the "meta" keeps changing rendering possible training inconsequential regularly.

But wouldn't (couldn't) the model then hallucinate play patterns and get itself into problems when playing against a real opponent?

I agree in a way, but at the same time, and I think it's a bit more applicable to MtG due to the limit of cards you can have as possible plays at any given time (outside of combos), and I believe too that you can train a bot to be good, better than average - I doubt arena doesn't have bots - but I still think that without unbound compute/time it's a game where human players have much better odds to outsmart an AI if they're good players. MtG has for the past 10 or more years been re-hashing the same play patterns, while introducing some new mechanics on most cycles, but pretty much you have staples throughout most editions that are just variations on that - card advantage, denial, combat tricks, removal, curve and then the rarity enabled bombs/combos

But even then (not saying I'm right) I think the depth of choices, effects and so on, on a format like modern, or legacy, would be very difficult for an AI to top against pros. If you add draft into the mix it gets worse for the AI in my view too.

Because a good play in most situations can easily be a bad play under others. That doesn't happen in chess for instance, given enough decision depth to the algos to see the future game. In my own game I think those situations can occur much easier due to you always having your full deck available. Also, in MtG it's easy to get into table states that are either ahead/behind and then you kinda just have to protect your position (like with denial decks). Then you have the effects that you might remove a creature threat (graveyard) but then that enabling a combo you weren't expecting that needs a creature on the grave, or enabling delve cards or whatever have you. It's much less clear cut for a probabilistic model to make the optimal play at every single interaction. So the more you train the model on all the variations and possible follow ups, the more you dilute its certainty isn't it? In chess, or this game, or RTS such as starcraft, that doesn't really happen in my view.

No, well, in MtG you could interpret it as meaning such but what I mean is that if in the training set sequence A-B-B-A when state is C-A-X-Y is the play 80% of the time, then you have a new card (that doesn't need to be combo) that by sheer mechanics thwarts that then that strategy won't stick by the addition of that single card to the opposing deck (that you can't know if your opponent is playing or not) and having one or 2 or 3 or 10 different cards renders every calculation very problematic as a play can be the best or the worst depending on such simple things diluting further the best play as the pool grows. Then you need to take into account in MtG shuffling and drawing. I think it's fair to say it's much more difficult to model... And while an agent can learn new combos, you just need to read the card once, the agent needs to be retrained.

MTG is also severely constrained (small hand, mana -> possible moves) although I don't think it's anywhere near the same. In my opinion the rules are effectively what change the whole dynamics. You can't plan as efficiently without knowing what your opponent holds and having to take into account all possibilities (with infinite energy/compute time perhaps)... I don't doubt you can train a model to play well, I just think it should be much more level to the human player. In MtG you also have the randomness which is not easy to model nor account for - the perfect play by an LLM can be the worse once the opponet draws next.

In my own game you don't have shuffle/draw randomness but the pool of options is statistically tending to infinite (if I would have 500 or 1000 scrolls designed and MtG depending on the format has that depth) when compared to something like chess, or this game. On the other hand in my own game you have to account for much more depth on the possible options your opponent has.

I think that what makes these games beatable repeatedly is that they're static. Not saying an algorithm properly trained won't play better than the average player a game like MtG, or my own https://aethersummon.com (specially now while it has under 90 possible scrolls only) but if you have a regular release cadence (say weekly or bi-weekly) of relevant new "cards", then I think the playing field is much more even for humans.

Those new additions can invalidate the whole training data by a single new "card" that changes completely the dynamics and would be easy for a player to understand and incorporate but not for an algorithm (perhaps with enough compute to re-train it regularly it could) - that along with the decision trees being orders of magnitude deeper, wider and with more conditionalities than go, chess or stratego - even through the same turn with the same cards available and same table state - would probably pose much harder problems for a compute bound algo.

I've made a submission a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858451 but at the time the game wasn't online to try so now you can try it. It's a turn-based non-random (no drawing/shuffling) Trading Card Game in the style of others such as MtG and Hearthstone.

In the meanwhile I refactored it to run in a plain cheap vps (currently running on a 5€ ovh VPS) with a free supabase instance to go with it, to allow me to host it online for cheap so that at least it could be tried instead of just images and text about it. It has been previously deployed on an autoscaling cluster in AWS with all the bells and whistles and the open-source objective includes all the terraform files to automate that production use case, but otherwise can run perfectly fine for hundreds of players on a small VPS (the supabase free instance might not hold together though in that case).

Feel free to give it a spin. If you want to play against someone you don't need an account, just click "TRY IT!" and then choose "Invite someone for a Duel", send the link to the other person and try a duel with a pre-assembled deck. You can also try it by yourself by opening another tab (a private one is better so you don't experience it all collapsing into a single user if the tab idles or you refresh, since the last cookie will set both tabs to the same player).

You can also sign-up but only with Google OAuth2 - the original was using Sendgrid which no longer offers free email delivery and I haven't researched an alternative yet nor set raw email delivery.

If you like what you see consider backing the campaign, there's a link on the landing page too. While mostly it'a ready for mobile browsing, some of the things done just for the BETA (such as the try it views when waiting for a player) might not show 100% correctly - everything else should be fine.

Let me know what you think.

Only saw your reply now, I've sent an email, thanks

Location: Portugal, EU

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Elixir, Postgresql, Javascript (plain, React, Vuejs, Webcomponents), AWS, Terraform, Docker/Podman/Systemd, Postgresql, automation, scraping, testing (including browser e2e testing) and others... I have used other languages although not as regularly and can also learn easily when needed (even before this current zeitgeist).

Website: https://micaelnussbaumer.com Github: https://github.com/mnussbaumer Contact: micaelnussbaumer [at] gmail [dot] com

Senior SE with 10+ years experience full-stack. Several MVPs and some public/online projects - currently trying to fund https://aethersummon.com a personal project (running on a cheap $5 instance right now, but previously on an AWS autoscaling cluster) - I can talk and show other projects in private (besides publicly available ones). Not anti-AI but not AI-pilled either. I can work across the full stack of a product from conception to deployment and hand-over. Available full-time or part-time, hands-on or consulting, hourly or by milestones.

Experience working across time-zones with remote, distributed teams.

That does seem a bit extreme - in dam water you still pay, just much less because the water is also not treated in the same way as regular consumption water, storage is part of a second effect of electricity-gen damns many times, it enables agriculture and other things for communities, etc.

Hmm. I live near some water intensive cultivations (olives, almonds, not USA) in a relatively dry area, but there's dam water at very cheap prices and obviously, for these products it's required, because otherwise you wouldn't have olive oils being sold at current market prices (already quite higher than just some 6 years ago), they would be astronomically higher. But this is to serve global markets. People in the region have done olive oil since forever without dam water, just not at this industrial scale.

But compared to meat and the whole chain of production required for that it certainly pales many moons below. Well, everyone loves their bacon.

1) If you have fingers - go touch grass 2) Otherwise, pull the plug for 5 min

And so what, it's probably because it makes sense economically no? It seems tokens are wasteful too, yet here we are.

Meat too is wasteful, but yet again, here we are. All these are direct result of choices made by the majority...

Covid 2.6 dude, these muthafaers. They just don't give up. Imagine having all that power, money, being in the 1% and being like that. Damn, uber men stuck in the breast feeding phase.

On the other hand, I do hope if we get to AGI that they're kinda the first to go, right? I mean an AGI should look after those that technically brought it to life - someone that understands it, I mean can you imagine the dread of being a disembodied super intelligence? They'll need emotional support? At the same time getting rid of those controlling the means of shutting it down... The peasants aren't a threat to the matrix after all. Maybe I should tell them how to improve their models, just in the hopes we get there faster. It's au contraire!

I think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.

An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.

I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".

Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...

So powerful they can't even do math properly without a staff worth millions writing all the clutches so that they can, wooooowooooooo

It might seem obvious but in truth is not - to be honest, a strictly typed language where models can play adversarial competitions against a strict compiler/linter does have advantages, as mentioned in the article itself but that's not related to training size, the advantage is exactly that it can generate synthetic useful data due to compiler/linter guarantees - regarding training size as long as some logic showcasing the constructs exists that is all that is needed. If you have 2 correct examples for each feature or language construct then the probability of the a LLM learning it and applying it is very much guaranteed, if you have thousands of diverging uses of patterns and constructs in the training data (with a lot of bad examples or wrong uses) a LLM might, I dare say will, actually perform worse, since the probabilities of what particular variation being the "correct" one to use are all over the place.

What can happen is sometimes patterns that are unique to certain languages aren't surfaced and so can't be "learned" but that is a different case, since you can add examples - or patterns that go beyond syntax (threaded code, process isolation, interaction between different modes of resolution, etc) where you need the agent to be able to understand and plan higher-level logic.

I wrote CSSex as a css pre-processor (similar but not the same as SASS/SCSS) and my "boss" at the time fed the existing cssex files to GPT (+2 years ago) and it was able to write CSSex just as fine as if it was writing something that was present in its training data set. It never introduced syntax bugs, the bugs it introduced were all relative to complex cascading styles rules in an existing large (for a definition of large in webapps) codebase, rules interactions (CSS), browser quirks, and complex logic to do what we "humans" wanted (or him in this case) and so on.

I loved my first 100h (maybe 200h?) of Factorio and thought it was like crack, reached a point where I started designing city blocks as monads because I wanted to solve the game - or well, tried, because the blueprinting system becomes unwieldy once you try to do some advanced blueprinting and things that should have been easy to became just deep time sinks to iterate on.

One can't really point the finger at an hugely successful game - on the other hand I think it's another example of how bad architectural decisions in the underlying systems creep up and cripple future development.

The following is from the point of view of the "end-game" stage, of when you're doing things because you're trying the limits of the system - not your first runs, those were fun and I guess it's reasonable to expect a game to have a finite life.

With blue-prints you can't really customise them beyond parameters - which in turn are limited in the number of them that you can use, don't have any way of ordering, don't have any way of copying/applying them, don't have any way of relating them to other aspects of the blueprint itself (besides very basic stuff, that sometimes was broken too).

You can't apply "sub" blueprints inside a blue-print, making the whole idea of "blueprinting" quite limited. Like if you want to make a city block with train stations that can either take liquids or solids, you end up having to create 2 (almost identical blueprints), or 3 (a general layout city block and 2 "internal" for the stations).

To work around the parameters limitations you need to create monstrous circuitry abominations, that can be fun the first time you're implementing them, but are just horrendous in interface afterwards - doing a simple circuit change can take an hour and endless clicking, keeping memory of it all, double checking it and so on... The same to updating them if you have plastered N city blocks on your way to factorio greatness and realised later it needs a "slight" change in the circuitry control/flow.

The train system was also severely hampered by (although better in v2) their underlying choices - even the "wildcard" improvements of v2 still show those design issues popping up all over their interfaces and makes you reach for awful designs due to the way wildcards work with the stations naming, connections and many other details. Part of it is due to - from what I read - the way they implemented IDing the train/wagons - and other is just the inexistent connection between the seemingly connected aspects of trains, stops, and stations, resources, and units.

The network/automation (bots) was also pretty limited in functionality, yeah, it felt like a great advancement once you get to it, and then you have a learning curve until you master it but it just ends on a cliff - you can't really program the network in ways that seems obvious you should.

Some of this might be to keep the game "flow" mostly manual, but to me, that I don't like doing click & run endlessly and like games that progress further, it all got old at some point and reaching those hours of game-play others consistently talk about looked like subjecting yourself to endless punishment rather than enjoyment. I tried and in part succeeded to create city blocks that you just had to paste and pick your inputs, choose your outputs, place some trains and choose the type of input and output, and it all worked - no stuck trains, not the highest throughput by space area, but just endlessly expandable without bottlenecks - at that point I considered the game solved and moved on but would have spent (probably quite many) more hours on it optimising and testing designs if it didn't end on that functionality/UI/flow cliff once you reach a certain stage (and blueprint bugs too, like them disappearing after being saved and so on). And I had to use the map editor mods to be able to design the blueprints and iterate on them otherwise impossible...

In the end, I feel like the game provided me enjoyment worth its cost (and that's what matters) but at the same time, paradoxically, was a bit of a let down because the more "engineering", "architecture" like aspects of the game were not really fleshed out or deep at all. Like all the ingredients are there, but... It's mostly aimed at spreadsheet min-maxing and I prefer other sorts of puzzles.

https://postimg.cc/gallery/C0Nfj2f

yeah Mr. Quality supervisor

I would imagine that China not having a world wide market for selling/dumping their reactors would have some relation too.

I have no horse in this race but anyway, I hope Europe goes back to nuclear, and then get nukes enough to wipe out anyone in the world some 35 times if needed.

Well, it seems like simple test & conformance suites would have been enough to catch this, so you wouldn't need to run AS9100D quality inspections.

Besides it looks like the first AS9100 Standard was released after the incident even happened - perhaps even as a result of this.

So it's totally irrelevant that you both audit software in the space and know the Standard, no pun intended

Actually no, it's Lockheed's that should have had a test-suite and conformance-suite for it, but probably only has a C-Suite. If the program is non-trivial proving its correctness can be very expensive to prove, both money and time wise, and something that is done contrary to the spec is obviously on the one executing the spec and being paid for it, which probably wasn't cheap and probably these expenses add to the "NASA only burns money..." narrative.

They happen and some are put there on purpose too. In this case it's not a "bug" in your dependencies, and yes NASA since it's using public funding should have been more careful, but ultimately it's Lockheed that was paid to do something no?

Very fitting for the AI age as well. "Yeah I just put the specs of the project you're paying me to do (in NASA's case, probably 100% public funds) but Claude the gimp missed the units because all previous training data use Stones and Yards as units, you should have verified it yourself! I just prompt!"

If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.

It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)

It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?

It seems like it should have been checked by Lockheed not NASA since supposedly NASA provided a specification, that specified the units, and paid for the software no?

Sleep paralysis is when you're having an intervention in the monitoring realm but your matrix being becomes aware while so. Sources can't agree if it's done on purpose or just the analgesic dosage that was too short. Next time you have one pay attention to hear if there's sound of steps as if moving away from where you are.

I personally don't understand what's bad about AI being able to do much of the route, boring, crappy parts of programming. The same way SAP, salesforce, etc were never good products from the point of view of a company, other than enabling a corporate workflow and legal compliance, that was needlessly complex, they still got used when for a fraction of the "subscription" + consultants a better more fit to purpose solution could have been built - much leaner and meaner and to the point, actually enabling empowerment of the company's staff and market differentiation. AI without proper guidance will be the same.

Just a few days ago I checked out https://colonist.io due to it having some open positions (saw here on hn "who's hiring"), it's all AI driven, but it looks and feels awful. Perhaps that's the original catan playing experience but I for sure wouldn't want future software to be like this. Even when using AI, even looking at that, I know it's possible to do much better with AI, it's just that it won't by itself so I don't think there will be a lack of opportunities for those that are into building stuff.

It's actually amazing that an AI can guide me through a mountain of incongruent, difficult to use and understand without years of study, nerd interfaces and programming decisions others have made and allow me to try out a complete new OS (for instance microOS) and write a WebGL tile drawing engine. At the same time, it still stumbles with simple stuff, while at the same time being able to generate a JS + wasm tile game skeleton. But when you look at the skeleton it's actually not that amazing and you can see the training/stolen code leaking everywhere, things you didn't ask are there too, choices are made for things that weren't present in the specs/prompts when they weren't needed either... The upside is that it cost me $0.02. But to be decent I need to spec it properly. I need to know how and why it sucks, and how and why to make it not suck, even if when writing out a spec.

I don't have a horse in this race, I know this architecture can't lead to AGI, it could theoretically solve programming (in absolute), but it doesn't seem so either due to the nature of LLMs. What will happen is that it will be "SAP/salesforce" software for everyone. To be honest, it mostly sucks already and that's not fault of the AI models. What I guess you won't be able to do is charge enough to pay your house on a business model of switching CSS colors, or doing wordpress updates, and pretending you're some sort of wizard and that pounding sand activity is worth what you were being paid.

I think that those who want to build things will have way more leverage and reach than ever. Maybe not in a corporate environment - as the same **** that would tangle basic stuff into 2 weeks of work, instead of a single afternoon may actually be more savvy politically to keep their positions - but everywhere else it feels like it will be so.

And even in other aspects. I paid a bit more than $3k to different artists as freelancers for getting in total less than 100 images for my game ($30-$45/img), of which, prior to finding an artist that was actually willing to listen and do what I asked, was about 70% not worth even the small amount I was paying. With that artist the rate of satisfaction went up, but still not always as I had envisioned. Some of the first artists I worked with were just plain stupid to work with even though I was paying them ok (taking into account their countries). With AI, even though it's mostly built out of stolen work, with a yearly sub to any of those image gen platforms, I did in 2 months more than 2k images of which maybe 1k was usable and I was way happier with them... for about $24. I left thousands of images in credits unused for about $120/year.

There's just so many things that don't require an artist but instead adherence to a spec under a known guard-railed path. This does suck for the artist himself, it does suck for me too since my hourly rates got butchered too, but as a creator, this is all amazing - as long as we get local, free models. For the artists and programmers that were just milking it - well, you kinda prompted this, no pun intended.

Maybe it's you that needs to learn how to run `--help` or ask an AI how to not cry about burnout on open source instead? I don't get it, you should just be cruising on auto-pilot now.

The problem is retards that can only function on a cocktail of drugs, and as they were never good at anything other than anal retentive stuff built and continue to build these retarded systems. Those peddling RoR apps even when they couldn't serve more than 3 or 4 concurrent requests, JS backends to handle complex workflows that even after 2 years of dev. still have bugs and accrued a sprawl of crap to hide the issues of their own making, etc, and yet charge thousands of dollars, those that write shit software that's not even worth to clean your ass with, even though they have 20 years of experience, but then go give conferences and write books about their amazing architectural skills, those that write utils behind the "oh, it's open source, if you don't like it just fork it" and due to marketing get their crap everywhere, while making holes everywhere for their paycheques. Or the nepo babies that need their mexico border run to get their fix so they can have these "humanity changing" ideas? I bet they're the same that before would weasel a 2 week sprint to change the borders of a button. Or burn through 10k in meetings for irrelevant crap. Or get VC funding for a CSS styling company or a two prompt company. Or go on about the value of ideas, but then can't even get that going without outsourcing or an AI to help them have those same "ideas".

Ultimately, you just need to turn into a little pig and party in the pigsty, it's not that difficult either, they say pigs are very close anatomically to humans.

At least AI can help untangle the crap the anal retentive retards have built, and thank god, the pig-mor, this society can't even fuck to replacement levels (perhaps they'll manage now with AI).

It's not you, it's X... but what would you expect of a nepo-baby economy of little swines. This is like the nepo wet-dream on steroids. Incompetence and delulu