
Dungeon crawling or lucid dreaming? - Impossible
https://aiweirdness.com/post/187645450357/dungeon-crawling-or-lucid-dreaming/
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JohnJamesRambo
I’m no expert, but it just seems like a lot of nonsense? This doesn’t fit my
definition of a game as much as it just seems like a random semi-amusing
chatbot.

~~~
malux85
Yeah, but have you noticed over the last few years it's getting better and
better (i.e. less and less nonsense).

This is the beginning of machine reasoning and procedural storytelling

~~~
notahacker
There's not much reasoning going on in those samples. It can stick a subject
input you provide it into a sentence which is sometimes serendiptously funny
(and usually grammatically correct tbf, although it looks like that's mostly
because it heavily reuses direct quotes from its source material), but it
can't handle the basics of game construction like responding properly to a
request to go north after telling you there's a path to the north

~~~
bluntfang
>There's not much reasoning going on in those samples.

but you agree there is some? that's the significance.

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juped
There is clearly no reasoning going on in those samples.

Computers have been able to reason for longer than they've been able to dream,
anyway.

~~~
bluntfang
>There is clearly no reasoning going on in those samples.

other people in this thread don't hold that opinion.

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archibaldJ
Looking at it from a different perspective this could basically be what the
state of consciousness is engaged in during REM sleep. An exchange of action-
responses with the “perception module” in maintenance mode splitting out
chunks of trained data describing half-sensible representations of
abstractions, doing so based on how the “decider module” reacts to it. In this
overly simplified model, a dream is merely a conscious interpretation of a set
of brief and segmented memories of this somewhat “adversarial” process between
the two modules.

~~~
K0SM0S
Interesting image.

One thing to consider, to further your thought exploration: it seems that in
the human brain, both data and logic use the 'same hardware', i.e. storage and
processing are reliant on the same physical structures. Memory, for all we
know, is a factual impression whose topology is closest to giving it
'meaning'.

I picture it as having a mesh+distributed multi-CPU system, wherein CPU/core
'cache' is in fact _all_ of memory (no 'external' RAM or cold storage,
physically). Data seems sharded between CPUs, i.e. topology of neurons
(notably diameter of 'network connections', axons and dendrites).

I can picture indeed chunks of data 'lighting up' and enabling some partial
processing during REM / dreams. Another crucial observation, I think, is
related to "EMDR" (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). It's both
the natural way we deal with small traumas in our sleep, and has become a
psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional
distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences (think horrors of
war, grave assault, etc).

This is purely mechanical and essentially helps de-correlate emotions from
memory, i.e. you de-sensitize memory, learn to think about X without feeling
the PTSD.

There is also a fundamentally "adversarial" discourse in the human
consciousness: internally we both speak "as" and "to" ourselves, we freely
move from "I" to "you" in monologue.

I don't have a proposition to tie all this. Just sharing food for thought.

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partisan
For someone who played muds less for the grind and more for the discovery
aspect, I could see this being an entertaining experience.

I really enjoyed reading the article, btw. The writing was great, almost as
winding and random and dreamlike as the subject matter.

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abledon
tldr; interesting results! But suitable for mass consumption.

theres something uncanny about unleashing this type of 'AI' creativity that
just 'remixes' endlessly with no human curation.

It's like pulling up to an all-you-can eat buffet made out of really low
quality 'mass' with no nutrients, and then just over-eating for the next 36
hours. Shoving fork after fork of dense slop into your stomach, and having
your body essentially treat it as poison since you only could digest the first
30 minutes of food you shovelled down your throat. The rest is indigestion for
all but the most discerning of minds.

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c1ccccc1
I tried it out. As other commenters have pointed out, it doesn't produce much
of a coherent story, but it does have its amusing moments. For example:

    
    
      THE DOOR NOW HAS THE LETTERS "ME" WRITTEN ON IT
    
      go through door
    
      I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT
    
      you put your hand on the handle and turn
    
      YOU PUT YOUR HAND ON THE HANDLE AND TURN IT WITH A ROAR
      THE DOOR OPENS

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newswasboring
Someone should put this in Dwarf Fortress, or even better, in Minecraft.
Imagine Minecraft generating proper dungeons for you to explore. I don't know
about game design to know how to do this or what's wrong with this idea.

~~~
DonHopkins
SimCity 2000 had a random newspaper article generator.

[https://66.media.tumblr.com/b102240b1a68b839c4c38b883f85e437...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/b102240b1a68b839c4c38b883f85e437/tumblr_nyhwrwCbUQ1uo5d9jo3_r1_640.gif)

[https://procedural-
generation.tumblr.com/post/134086657418/s...](https://procedural-
generation.tumblr.com/post/134086657418/simcity-2000-newspapers-
simcity-2000-doesnt)

>SimCity 2000 - Newspapers

>Simcity 2000 doesn’t just have terrain generation. Every city has between one
and six newspapers that are updated every month with new stories about the
city.

>The articles are clearly generated from templates, with liberal word
substitutions. The templates frequently correspond to the current state of
your city, with a few international news items thrown in. The absurdity of the
word swaps and the tone of the templates fit in well with the rest of Maxis’s
trademark humor.

>Later SimCity games would use news tickers, but I miss the extra bit of
narrative connection you get with your citizens when you read an interview
with them, even one constructed out of absurd templates. The news tickers
tended to have clever headlines, but become exhausted fairly quickly, whereas
the newspapers had predictable, even serious headlines and funny madlib text,
which is I think what gives them more staying power.

>Fred Haslam, Debra Larson, and Chris Weiss are credited with writing the
content for the newspapers.

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aflag
It feels more like a chat or than dungeon crawling.

I feel like one would get better results by procedurally generating the world
then using words just to describe it. Although I'm sure something like that
must exist already.

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vanderZwan
What do you consider "better" in this context?

The thing with textual descriptions is that it is vague enough to let you fill
in the blanks. The generated text relies on the human mind to complete it.
Generating a world a la Minecraft loses that ambiguity, which in this
situation might actually be a problem because it can no longer lean on our
imagination.

~~~
aflag
Better results in my opinion would be coherent gameplay.

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equalunique
This title amused me. For many years now, my dreams have actually felt a lot
like dungeon crawling. Every night it is a new area to explore, often with
strange challenges and puzzles along the way.

~~~
gchamonlive
It does seem a lot like that... I have a good recollection of my latest
dreams, right before I wake up, whenever I sleep too long. Today was specially
interesting...

My recollection begins at na office, clearly not a place I have been before,
white walls, an L shaped room, long white messy desks full of computers and
papers, but everyone in the room was known to me. They were my co-workers.

I remember talking about something I am upset about. I find that I am upset
that they think my code is unacceptable. My colleague next to me keeps to his
computer, clearly avoiding contact. Someone rises from the right of my field
of vision carrying an opened notebook in his hand. He is the most senior
programmer and asks me to accompany him outside. "Outside", he says. I am
taken aback... "are you asking me to leave?" (like a teacher would ask a child
that is misbehaving). Outside, he says again. I say "No! I can prove I am
right!"

Suddenly me, this senior programmer and the guy next to me was entering a
brightly lit, wooden room. I know I have been there before, but it is all
different. I realise they turned the place into something like an old museum.
My thought is that they did that to protect the project I was working on.

I walk past the same long desks as before, now wooden instead of plain white,
but covered in paper just as before. I walk towards a desk attendant, a woman
I can't exacly see the face. I ask to see the archives of 2016-2017. Now I can
suddenly see her face, its expression of secrecy, looking around. She takes me
by the hand, up some stairs, towards a somewhat hidden door. The set is now
like a barn, there are many people around, but they all have their backs to
me. It still feels like they are looking at stuff in a museum.

She tells me, before going through the door, that I must keep close, there are
several monsters in place to protect the archive and if I look I might get
scared and run off, getting lost in the halls.

Beyond the door there is a mesh of corridors, desks and chairs to either
sides, disfigured, gray people sitting, like they were in a bar, talking. The
mood is agitated, and as we run past I feel some of them jumping up. I keep
staring at the wooden floor as we rush through the maze.

We finally arrive at a dead end corridor, separated by a wooden grid frame
without any doors. Can exactly tell how long it felt we were running for, many
minutes, maybe hours. There is a wooden desk with benches at either sides. She
starts taking files from shelves and setting them at the table, as I notice
there are wolves coming at us from the end of the corridor. I step through the
frame and take a wand of my coat. I realise I am powerful enough and make some
sort of dance by the end of which a blast of air sets the wolves running off
the other way, scared.

I go back to the table and I tell her I am an Auror (yes just like in Harry
Potter, when I woke up I found it so silly, but the feeling was cool at the
time) and she tells me I should have told her before, impressed.

Before waking up a flash of scenes rush through, me sifting through code
printed in those files and realising I connected magic with code, and that all
my code was really working after all and that that is the way that actual
magic work, through those code abstractions.

Looking back at the dream, it feels a lot like a neural network generated
plot, with two differences. The first is that the scenery and plot seem to
change less often, and the second is that even though everything changes, some
artifacts from the previous dream iteration still remains, influencing the
next scene.

I have other recollections and they all go a lot like this, many times the
dreams taking me back to the same place as before, but with all the previous
dream elemnts still present, in an never ending quest until I wake up.

~~~
equalunique
Thanks for sharing! Yes, mine often end up quite elaborate as well.

Here's a question for you: Are the people in your dream from real waking life,
or are they more like characters in a story/NPCs in a game?

In my dreams I have charachters who aren't from real life. Like for example, I
don't have a sister in real life, but in one dream, there's this person who is
just casually my sister, and it all feels like it makes sense, even though in
real life it makes no sense. In a related fashon, there's associations with
people that aren't logical, but feel logical in the dream. For example, in one
disturbing nightmare, I discovered a box belonging to my father - but there's
no reason why in the dream I should conclude that the box is his, it's
literally a box with zero context, but the context was somehow there none the
less.

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tomkat0789
It shouldn't be hard to manually add some object permanence. Looks like that'd
fix a lot of the nonsensical issues it has. Is it worthwhile to train a
neutral net to realize, "no, you don't have a large bowl, butter, or sugar."

With a few crutches like that, it could be a funny storyteller!

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ma2rten
I feel like this game could be improved a lot with better training data. The
neural network doesn't have training examples of things that are impossible,
so it's responding in unexpected ways.

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crystaln
These descriptions all seem like nonsequitors which limits my interest. If it
had any coherence it would seem super fun.

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novalis78
Sounds like when chatting to the sillybean Chatbot on google home.

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hayksaakian
Is there some way to embed a sense of continuity in these text generators?

It feels like we're close, but not there yet

