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Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

jackhopkins.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#71

Post by noddybear »

WJW wrote: post #42
noddybear wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree that planning is essential to perform well in Factorio - my hope is that we can create agents in FLE that can better front-load the planning part, as well as create utility functions for future use - such that as the agent progresses, it can do more and more in each program / step. For example, it could create a function called 'resolve_resource_dependencies', which would enable it to backfill miss…

An agent writing its own library to interface with a good solver like Z3 (or even writing some basic planning algorithms itself) seems like the epitome of a "costly long term investment that does nothing for the short term". The only thing I can see overcoming such problems are deep search trees, but AFAIK that is not how LLMs work at all.

I experimented a bit using deep search trees to find better Factorio trajectories (MCTS), which worked somewhat well. Unfortunately, it's very computationally expensive, and probably only makes sense in a training context (i.e gathering trajectories to train a model in a supervised setting).

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#73

Post by mrighele »

WJW wrote: post #27

Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts: Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here. Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that whil…

> the game is about eventually building thousands of the new item.

I disagree that you need significant amount of thinking ahead. At the beginning spaghetti belt is fine, as you have little resources and you don't have the luxury of overbuilding. Once you start getting "bigger" and into more complex designs you can just leave what you already built how it is and build the new stuff somewhere else.

By the time you need to produce thousands of pieces of an item you can probably prepare a blueprint that builds the whole factory in a click.

My approach to factor.io is built on phasesw

1: build ad hoc infrastructure for the specific material that I need, close to the raw resources

2: prepare blueprints for specific resources, so that if I need more of something I can just build an extra factory. I make the blueprints so that I can compose them, like input belts on one side and output belt on the other. such "factories" are almost self contained, as in they get only a subset of materials (plates, plastic and stuff that involves liquids) and produce all the intermediate materials. This leaves some optimizations on the table, but simplify the logistic. Use trains to fetch resources from far.

3: compose the blueprints of the previous step to make "megafactories" with stations included. While at step 2 input and output of the factories are belts, at this step the input/output are train stations for specific material (with proper names, so I can add a new factory and trains will start delivering materials right away)

Of course my approach is not the only possible and probably not even efficient. I play for fun, with no care for the time it takes, as long as the time spent is enjoyable.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#74

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

eterm wrote: post #52
WJW wrote: post #27

Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts: Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here. Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that whil…

> Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here I'm an anti-bus extremist. ( I've even considered regsitering BanTheBus.com and doing an over-the-top static anti-bus website. ), so take what I'm about to say with a pinch of salt. Also note that my post applies to non-space-age. Space-age changes the gameplay fundamentally, so this really only applies to factorio 1.1 or 2.0 with space-age…

I think the point of “The Main Bus” in guides is that it’s easy for newer players, and thereby takes a lot of complexity off the table when you still haven’t really figured out how petroleum works, or keep falling behind the biters because you underestimated red bullets demand for steel, etc etc etc. Eventually you figure out trains; until then a main bus is an idiot-resistant way to carry resources across the entire base.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#75

Post by Hammershaft »

martbakler wrote: post #66
kevmo314 wrote: post #43

Does it provide screenshots of the game state? I, too, would struggle to play the game pretty effectively if I could not visually see the game.

Just to jump in here as one of the authors We designed the API to be as spatially descriptive as possible (include x-y coordinates and neighbors in game state descriptions) and the agents have tools to aid them in carrying out actions which would benefit from vision (i.e find buildable areas on the map with different sizes, placing entities next to other entities etc). As Jack said, we completed most of the lab tasks…

Someone below mentioned the ASCII interface for dwarf fortress as being ideal for this, and I wonder if that kind of representation with a legend might produce spatially better results. The drawback I see is that elements can be layered on a tile in Factorio, or have properties that are not visually obvious in ASCII, so the llm would need to be able to introspect on the map.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#76

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

lupusreal wrote: post #44
WJW wrote: post #27

Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts: Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here. Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that whil…

I'm not convinced that factorio requires planning ahead for computer players . For human players it certainly does, because tearing up your factory and rebuilding to fix shortsighted designs has a steep time/labor cost. Even for human players though, this cost becomes mostly a psychological obstacle once you get construction bots.

Long-term planning is necessary if you have biters enabled: typically you need to secure territory/resources and invest in defenses before the resources run low and while the biters are still manageable. Otherwise things can get badly out of hand.

Edit: IMO the biggest difference between Satisfactory and Factorio is that Satisfactory has no crises. If a Satisfactory base shuts down it is annoying, but you can dig another miner / / build another plant / etc, entirely at your leisure. But in Factorio, a shutdown is an emergency with a ticking clock.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#77

Post by Hammershaft »

alexop wrote: post #17

its funny how video games are the hardest benchmark that humanity has for ai

I'd love to see a Baba is You or Stephen's Sausage Roll llm environment to gauge spatial reasoning. Stephen's Sausage Roll in particular could be very interesting because the mechanics are incredibly simple but challenging.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#78

Post by noddybear »

Hammershaft wrote: post #75
martbakler wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to jump in here as one of the authors We designed the API to be as spatially descriptive as possible (include x-y coordinates and neighbors in game state descriptions) and the agents have tools to aid them in carrying out actions which would benefit from vision (i.e find buildable areas on the map with different sizes, placing entities next to other entities etc). As Jack said, we completed most of the lab tasks…

Someone below mentioned the ASCII interface for dwarf fortress as being ideal for this, and I wonder if that kind of representation with a legend might produce spatially better results. The drawback I see is that elements can be layered on a tile in Factorio, or have properties that are not visually obvious in ASCII, so the llm would need to be able to introspect on the map.

I think your intuition is correct about the amount of information that needs to be encoded into an ASCII char. You could potentially use unicode to pack more more into each char, e.g direction, type, status etc. Or make each representation available on-demand, i.e 'show me the direction of all inserters in a 10 tile radius'.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#79

Post by barrystaes »

I have long dreamt of automating Factorio in the way that HDL and a PCB router works: just specify the ingredients and it produces a Factorio Blueprint.

First MVP stupid designs, then optimized routing, and eventually usable ingame where it connects with provided in/outputs.

Would be more fun to develop than to play obviously..

I liked the nilhouse mega base with that factory-train-blocks blueprints, its basically Factorio DUPLO.

Re: Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories

#80

Post by enragedcacti »

Aardwolf wrote: post #37
quchen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ! But it takes a while for it to become intuitive. »Chain in, rail out« gets you 90% there though.

In both Factorio and Satisfactory I end up using long (and I mean, multi-kilometers-long) belts all the time and never trains. Something about the track building being clunky, or I don't know what really the underlying thing that's making me prefer the simplicity of items-moving-and-splitting-and-merging-on-belts is

You should give them a shot again with 2.0, they made a ton of improvements to the track building:

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-377, https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-389, https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-403

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