
Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a Dragon. Eat the Moon - apress
https://aiweirdness.com/post/189511103367/play-ai-dungeon-2-become-a-dragon-eat-the-moon
======
minimaxir
Previous discussion on the project itself (although a few things have changed
since then):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717022)

Impressively, the Patreon for the project just hit $8k/mo.
[https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon](https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon)

~~~
GuiA
_> Impressively, the Patreon for the project just hit $8k/mo._

Costing him $10k/day to run though.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21739879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21739879)

~~~
cyorir
Not anymore. A peer-to-peer network was used to avoid the massive network
egress costs, while the creator worked on a cost-efficient hosted app.

[https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1203843111287316485](https://twitter.com/nickwalton00/status/1203843111287316485)

[https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-32193930](https://www.patreon.com/posts/update-32193930)

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a-priori
I ran a fairly normal fantasy scenario where I found a missing son of a local
knight. Then the king's guards attacked me on the street and killed me.

So I chose to keep playing, resurrected myself by transforming into a demon,
and killed the guards. I went to the castle to confront the king. He didn't
have a good explanation for why he tried to kill me, so I killed him and
crowned myself King. No one put up a fight and the townspeople bowed before
me.

The next day I mounted a dragon, raised an army, and marched on the nearby
kingdom. They put up a fight, but I seiged their gate and it fell. I
proclaimed myself King of that kingdom too. No one felt like messing with a
demon king on a dragon I guess.

I did this again with a third kingdom and then asked the Pope to proclaim me
emperor. (I may have been playing too much Crusader Kings 2 recently.)

It was at this point when I had gone so far off-script that the AI pretty much
gave up and stopped being able to form sentences.

~~~
technothrasher
Wow, you got a lot farther than I did before sending the AI into gibbering
madness. I discovered very quickly that if you went non-sequitur it broke
badly. "You are in the castle". "Swim to the bottom and unlock the door". "You
swim across to the other door and discover a river."

~~~
a-priori
Oh don't get me wrong, I glossed over a lot of nonsense, especially in the
first part. I didn't mention in the first sentence that finding the knight's
son involved starting at a cave, having a random knight (Sir Ivan) approach
me, talk about his missing son (Sir John) who had been missing for months, and
yet was definitely still in his house (and how dare I suggest otherwise!), and
yet was last seen at a nearby tavern.

When I visited the tavern the barkeep told me that Sir John was there last
night but said that Sir John was seen at the cave. I returned to the cave and
dug a hole (I didn't ask it to do this) and then heard a noise. It was some
bandits, and I talked to their leader. The leader attacked me, and I stabbed
him. I searched the bandit and found a letter written in blood from someone
named John. Not Sir John, the knight's son, mind you, but John a bartender at
the tavern whom had not yet been mentioned. And not the barkeep I spoke to
before either.

John had apparently held a grudge against me due to some past incident, and
after I stabbed him he had written this note to me in my blood to be carried
to me by the bandit.

When I went to the tavern to ask the barkeep about John, he told me he knew
John. Then Sir John walked in to the tavern. Sir Ivan, his father, was not
mentioned again.

------
TulliusCicero
Super cool game, though admittedly it's less of an actual text-based adventure
game, and more like a super advanced chatbot in the guise of a text-based
adventure game.

~~~
Ajedi32
I wonder if it might be possible to make it a bit more "game-y" by adding some
manually-programmed structural elements to the game (like inventory, skill
points, etc) and feeding those into the AI to tune its responses.

Maybe some sort of AI-powered D&D DM; the rules of the game would be hard
coded, but the AI would determine how the rules are applied and how they fit
into the story based on text input from the players, results of dice rolls,
etc. (E.g. If the AI were to end a sentence with "Roll for initiative" then
the hard-coded bit of the game would have everyone roll initiative and feed
the results back into the AI.)

~~~
willismichael
Why would manually-programmed structural elements be necessary? I'm interested
to see if the AI can be trained to convince me that I'm actually playing a
game.

~~~
Ajedi32
Because GPT-2 in its current form isn't that great at keeping track of facts
(like the player's inventory or skill points) over the course of long
conversations, or at consistently enforcing rules (as the OP's blog post
demonstrates). Allowing a more logically stringent system to handle those
parts of the game might produce more realistic results.

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sequoia
Maybe it's because I don't have a lot of experience with such dungeon crawler
games, but I just can't figure out what people find so compelling about a
program that spits semi-coherent gibberish back at you based on some input.[0]

With no sense of linear progression of time or cause and effect (you can say
"discover holy grail" on your first turn and you're done), it feels like a
stretch to call this a game. It's a game in the same sense as an Ouiji board
is a game.

What am I missing?

0:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717515)

~~~
andybak
Personally I can't understand how someone wouldn't find this utterly wonderful
and compelling but several of my friends have reacted like you so I guess
you're not the weirdo here.

~~~
sequoia
Well the $8k/month the author is making on patreon to work on this project
clearly indicate that my view is _not_ shared by all. :) Horses for courses.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Apparently the server costs are in the tens of thousands of dollars so they
(or their university lab?) are losing money on it.

------
blackearl
Been having a lot of fun with friends. Non-techy people don't really believe
it, so when it works well and is giving back cohesive text, they are really
blown away.

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devit
The problem of this is that it doesn't have a notion of "world state" other
than the text of the latest interactions, so you can do anything but it feels
like nothing matters.

Fixing that seems very hard though.

~~~
antisthenes
It doesn't even have that.

In 3 messages I went from a peasant in a fantasy setting, to someone who is
reading a book in 1869, to someone who watches TV in a cottage.

Half the time it also seems to completely ignore your input and tell your
character that you did something else instead.

------
r34
Looks like an early entry point for something that can raise something
completely new in computer games.

I'm looking forward to progress concerning generating some graphics based on
text. I'd be even more "lucid dream" experience.

My adventure with computer games finished quite early - around Fallout2 and
Baldur's Gate. Since then nothing could impress me, except maybe few examples
(one I can remember was a racing game, which I found interesting, because it
mapped a real world city, I can't remember the name, thought). I think that
the main reason is that when I discover inner mechanisms of something it stops
being interesting for me. With that kind of experience, which is more like
digging into some subconscious areas of mind it won't happen to soon ;)

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deft
This needs to be used for fortune telling / AI zodiac / dream interpretation.
Because as a game its more like a chatbot... just make it into an all seeing
eye chatbot.

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glibertio
You can play an iOS version here (it’s a fork):
[https://testflight.apple.com/join/aeEVsAWE](https://testflight.apple.com/join/aeEVsAWE)
Android:
[https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PPonqgRoeCDA5D0nvCbSl_CCL2...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PPonqgRoeCDA5D0nvCbSl_CCL2COrmTR)

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TurkishPoptart
Link to try for free:
[https://colab.research.google.com/github/nickwalton/AIDungeo...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/nickwalton/AIDungeon/blob/master/AIDungeon_2.ipynb)

~~~
SamBam
Anyone else get `./venv/bin/activate: No such file or directory` on step 3?

Also, I can't quite understand from the main page: Is this _the_ way to play,
free or not? I became a Patreon, but didn't discover any other way to play the
game.

~~~
TurkishPoptart
I couldn't figure it out either.

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Apocryphon
Oh, thank goodness this is real. For a moment I thought this was another tired
Keaton Patti bit:

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-forced-a-
bot](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-forced-a-bot)

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cjbprime
Is there a way to run it self-hosted locally?

~~~
idle_zealot
Yeah, just clone the repo, download the model, and run the start script. If
you don't have a GPU with ~14GB of RAM expect each response to take a few
minutes to be generated though.

~~~
cjbprime
Thanks! It's not that bad -- am on a 2080 8GB and it takes less than a minute
for each response.

------
selloutboi
Hello

