This was awesome! I think this project is super creative and original. Also, I got top 63%!
Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
61–70 of 227 posts
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#62yeah it's a cool concept, but knowing what I know about the ability of generative AI to accurately replicate specific moments of history, it falls flat. The whole point of this kind of thing should be to reward people who can recognize "that architectural style wasn't invented until the 13th century" but that's precisely the sort of thing image models cannot do reliably.
I agree that it's not possible to have them do 13th century architectural style perfectly right now. But I believe it will be soon. The image/video models are improving, but so are the reasoning models, and they can check for and fix anachronisms.
I hope you're right. Are you aware of any image-gen models that apply chain-of-thought style reasoning (either agentic or via reinforcment learning to shape outputs?)
For example, consider this imagery from today's challenge: https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/fastab-f08e9.app...
These are some incredible monoliths: if they were real, I feel like I would have heard about them? And if they did... that's so cool. But because it's AI generated, I have a very low confidence level that this ever existed at all. Which is sad.
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#63yeah it's a cool concept, but knowing what I know about the ability of generative AI to accurately replicate specific moments of history, it falls flat. The whole point of this kind of thing should be to reward people who can recognize "that architectural style wasn't invented until the 13th century" but that's precisely the sort of thing image models cannot do reliably.
I agree that it's not possible to have them do 13th century architectural style perfectly right now. But I believe it will be soon. The image/video models are improving, but so are the reasoning models, and they can check for and fix anachronisms.
Reasoning models aren't needed for this. The loss function for the image models needs to take year into account.
This is entirely possible, as the incredible accuracy[1] of non-generative picture location models (a very similar problem) shows.
[1] https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-based-localization-on-...
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#64yeah it's a cool concept, but knowing what I know about the ability of generative AI to accurately replicate specific moments of history, it falls flat. The whole point of this kind of thing should be to reward people who can recognize "that architectural style wasn't invented until the 13th century" but that's precisely the sort of thing image models cannot do reliably.
I agree that it's not possible to have them do 13th century architectural style perfectly right now. But I believe it will be soon. The image/video models are improving, but so are the reasoning models, and they can check for and fix anachronisms.
Why not using img2vid starting from an historically accurate picture or painting?
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#65The super anachronistic output makes this really difficult. One of the examples was the battle in the war of the roses but all the imagery suggests over a hundred years later.
I had a "War of Roses" image too and was way off on it too. The flags and sigals were completely wrong.
I guessed it was supposed to be Agincourt because of the prominence of archers.
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's not possible to have them do 13th century architectural style perfectly right now. But I believe it will be soon. The image/video models are improving, but so are the reasoning models, and they can check for and fix anachronisms.
I hope you're right. Are you aware of any image-gen models that apply chain-of-thought style reasoning (either agentic or via reinforcment learning to shape outputs?) For example, consider this imagery from today's challenge: https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/fastab-f08e9.app... These are some incredible monoliths: if they were real, I feel like I would have heard about them? And if they did... that's so co…
No, not aware of image models that do chain-of-thought reasoning. But there are vision models that do it, so you can have them review the generated images and iterate on the prompts.
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#67This was awesome! I think this project is super creative and original. Also, I got top 63%!
Nice work! Thank you!
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#68This is cool, but I'm not sure some of the hints are not more red herrings than anything else. Because AI sort of blends things, the prompt needs to be spot on or, for example, India starts looking like any part of the middle east. Traditional China looks like Japan, etc.
Also some of the temporal clues were very good, some were 'wtf'.
I also laughed at some of the hallucination I witnessed. Like a group of people staring in a telescope pointing straight at a white wall.
Fun though, just needs to be honed in a little.
It would help to have markers on the timeline for the different ages, at least for the first round! e.g. Bronze age.
You already sort of do, being a Gregorian timeline and marking 0 AD as Christ's birth. That's a dead giveaway when you see crosses. So I think it would be fair and useful to give a range of eras as markers on the timeline.
The map could also be continental, and the locations more precise than the country.
The map could be more exciting, and change based on the timeline selection! It's currently showing the "current" map and not the map of the era; which in some respect is relevant.
Finally, the scoring could be more explanatory, you got 5,000 / 10,000 for the following reason / calculation method. Maybe a graph of points per time correction and location. It could also be more comprehensive scoring, with a slight multiplier for streaks, a badge for being good at temporal location vs. geolocation etc.
Scoring could animate up, to gamify the experience, create a sort of level end screen that builds up excitement. The map could animate and so could the timeline in this end phase.
I like the idea, there is a lot you could do to push this further.
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#69Personnaly I didn't felt as if I was trying to recognize a place and period in history, but trying to guess what prompts were used to generate the pictures. Or at least for some of the pictures where I wasn't as sure of the event (like seeing the rose on a picture for the war of the roses). Also I didn't listen to many of the sounds, but I got English voices for something happening in France (the Fauvisme guess). But…
Yeah, fair enough. Glad you had fun!
Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
#70Interesting that the AI makes many of the outdoor structures look ancient rather than how they'd look in the time period. People walking over crumbling ancient roads whole fallen ruins loom over them isn't exactly accurate.