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Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

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Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#3

Post by isoprophlex »

Now these seem to be truly artificially intelligent agents. Memory, volition, autonomy, something like an OODA loop or whatever you want to call it, and a persistent environment. Very nice concept, and I'm positive the learnings can be applied to more mundane business problems, too.

If only I could get management to understand that a bunch of prompts shitting into eachother isn't "cutting-edge agentic AI"...

But then again their jobs probably depend on selling something that looks like real innovation happening to the C-levels...

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#5

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

Reading the paper, this seems like putting the cart before the horse: the agents individually are not actually capable of playing Minecraft and cannot successfully perform the tasks they've assigned or volunteered for, so in some sense the authors are having dogs wear human clothes and declaring it's a human-like civilization. Further, crucial things are essentially hard-coded: what types of societies are available and (I believe) the names of the roles. I am not exactly sure what the social organization is supposed to imply: the strongest claim you could make is that the agent framework could work for video game NPCs because the agents stick to their roles and factions. The claim that agents "can use legal structures" strikes me as especially specious, since "use the legal structure" is hard-wired into the various agents' behavior. Trying to extend all this to actual human society seems ridiculous, and it does not help that the authors blithely ignore sociology and anthropology.

There are some other highly specious claims:

- I said "I believe" the names of the roles are hard-coded, but unless I missed something the information is unacceptably vague. I don't see anything in the agent prompts that would make them create new roles, or assign themselves to roles at all. Again I might be missing something, but the more I read the more confused I get.

- claiming that the agents formed long-term social relationships over the course of 12 Minecraft days, but that's only four real hours and the agents experience real time: the length of a Minecraft day is immaterial! I think "form long-term social relationships" and "use legal structures" aren't merely immodest, they're dishonest.

- the meme / religious transmission stuff totally ignores training data contamination with GPT-4. The summarized meme clearly indicates awareness of the real-world Pastafarian meme, so it is simply wrong to conclude that this meme is being "transmitted," when it is far more likely that it was evoked in an agent that already knew the meme. Why not run this experiment with a truly novel fake religion? Some of the meme examples do seem novel, like "oak log crafting syndrome," but others like "meditation circle" or "vintage fashion and retro projects" have nothing to do with Minecraft and are almost certainly GPT-4 hallucinations.

In general using GPT-4 for this seems like a terrible mistake (if you are interested in doing honest research).

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#6

Post by airstrike »

I've thought about this a lot. I'm no philosopher or AI researcher, so I'm just spitballing... but if I were to try my hand at it, I think I'd like to start from "principles" and let systems evolve or at least be discoverable over time

Principles would be things like self-preservation, food, shelter and procreating, communication and memory through a risk-reward calculation prism. Maybe establishing what is "known" vs what is "unknown" is a key component here too, but not in such a binary way.

"Memory" can mean many things, but if you codify it as a function of some type of subject performing some type of action leading to some outcome with some ascribed "risk-reward" profile compared to the value obtained from empirical testing that spans from very negative to very positive, it seems both wide encompassing and generally useful, both to the individual and to the collective.

From there you derive the need to connect with others, disputes over resources, the need to take risks, explore the unknown, share what we've learned, refine risk-rewards, etc. You can guide the civilization to discover certain technologies or inventions or locations we've defined ex ante as their godlike DM which is a bit like cheating because it puts their development "on rails" but also makes it more useful, interesting and relatable.

It sounds computationally prohibitive, but the game doesn't need to play out in real time anyway...

I just think that you can describe a lot of the human condition in terms of "life", "liberty", "love/connection" and "greed".

Looking at the video in the repo, I don't like how this throws "cultures", "memes" and "religion" into the mix instead of letting them be an emergence from the need to communicate and share the belief systems that emerge from our collective memories. Because it seems like a distinction without a difference for the purposes of analyzing this. Also "taxes are high!" without the underlying "I don't have enough resources to get by" seems too much like a mechanical turk

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#7

Post by Carrok »

isoprophlex wrote: post #3

Now these seem to be truly artificially intelligent agents. Memory, volition, autonomy, something like an OODA loop or whatever you want to call it, and a persistent environment. Very nice concept, and I'm positive the learnings can be applied to more mundane business problems, too. If only I could get management to understand that a bunch of prompts shitting into eachother isn't "cutting-edge agentic AI"... But then…

> If only I could get management to understand that a bunch of prompts shitting into eachother isn't "cutting-edge agentic AI"...

It's unclear to me how the linked project is different from what you described.

Plenty of existing agents have "memory" and many other things you named.

Re: Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

#8

Post by Tiberium »

Honestly I'm really excited about this. I've always dreamed of full blown sandbox games with extremely advanced NPCs (which the current LLMs can already kinda emulate), but on the bigger scale. In just a few decades this will finally be made into proper games. I can't wait.
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