A Perceptron in Age of Empires II • Hacker News Board

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#21

Post by TZubiri » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #8

The actual paper is linked above, and of course it’s bad. The gates are awesome ofc, but the paper’s philosophy is arrogant and uninformed (sorry Mr. Wynter!). And that’s what this is — including a video game example in your philosophy paper doesn’t make it a CS paper! Basically it uses the cool gates alongside vacuous statements like this… Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-u…

Hacking meme aside, lots of computer scientists are overextending their domain expertise into an area that has been well studied by philosophy and biology. It isn't surprising the software is good and the philosophy looks like outsider art.

Here are some relevant pointers to connect this discussion to the existing philosophy on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism

Basically there's a lot of cases where some properties arise from sets of a thing, which would otherwise not be present in a single or few things.

One classic example is that a single molecule or drop of water does not express fluid mechanics.

And of course, a bit more basic would be materialism, but maybe you are one of the lucky hundreds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#22

Post by golly_ned » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:38 AM UTC

solid_fuel wrote: post #6

> In-game constructions of NAND gates and a perceptron (forward prop and training) as described in in 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'. Interesting concept > We begin by proving that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing- complete. Then we build a perceptron and a circuit to train it in-game. With that, we argue that changing the substrate (representation) of an LLM also al…

Please tell me your comment is satirical too?

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#23

Post by golly_ned » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #8

The actual paper is linked above, and of course it’s bad. The gates are awesome ofc, but the paper’s philosophy is arrogant and uninformed (sorry Mr. Wynter!). And that’s what this is — including a video game example in your philosophy paper doesn’t make it a CS paper! Basically it uses the cool gates alongside vacuous statements like this… Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-u…

You're missing the satire.

And the 'argument', which is a funny way to recast the chinese room argument, which has also been discussed to death.

And you're also assuming any kind of position other than your own dogma -- that AI has Intelligence In Its Name and Humans Have Intelligence Therefore AI Has Human-Like Intelligence -- is based on some religious belief in the specialness of humans instead of pointing out where this analogy between Intelligence in its two senses breaks down.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#24

Post by COAGULOPATH » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:46 AM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #4

Age of Empires II had a creative map editor, where you could "program" via triggers and effects. It wasn't as in depth as the blizzard games which you could write code, but was easier to use. You could make a trigger (ie. units in this area, time passed, number of units on the field, build a building, etc) then effect (ie spawn unit, move unit, kill something, etc). Which was used in custom maps to do all sorts of fu…

I used to make those. There was a lot of creative stuff people discovered.

For example, the game's terrain was baked at launch, so you couldn't turn land into water. But someone noticed that bridges seemed to spawn water textures under them (a cosmetic detail), and if you created a Bridge1 object and deleted it in the same trigger, it would vanish too quickly for the player to see, creating the appearance that water had appeared out of nowhere.

Someone used it to make an "ice-breaker" ship, which would turn ice to water (I think this required dozens of triggers for each point on the ice.) Some of these things had thousands of triggers, which the editor absolutely wasn't designed for. (It had no copy+paste function, and the window of viewable triggers was tiny.)

Fun times.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#25

Post by golly_ned » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

TZubiri wrote: post #21

bbor wrote: post #8

The actual paper is linked above, and of course it’s bad. The gates are awesome ofc, but the paper’s philosophy is arrogant and uninformed (sorry Mr. Wynter!). And that’s what this is — including a video game example in your philosophy paper doesn’t make it a CS paper! Basically it uses the cool gates alongside vacuous statements like this… Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-u…

Hacking meme aside, lots of computer scientists are overextending their domain expertise into an area that has been well studied by philosophy and biology. It isn't surprising the software is good and the philosophy looks like outsider art. Here are some relevant pointers to connect this discussion to the existing philosophy on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergen…

Yes. There's nothing essentially new this latest round of AI has unturned that philosophers haven't turned over decades (or more ago). Nothing stopped philosophers supposing even a functionally perfect simulacrum of human intelligence, and getting technologically closer to it doesn't.

The real effect of the latest round of AI has been inducing software engineers to be pretend-philosophers as they're approaching this set of questions for the first time -- and are having a very hard time engaging given their enthusiasm for technology.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#26

Post by NooneAtAll3 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

avianlyric wrote: post #10

aesthesia wrote: post #9

From the judge prompt in the paper: > Papers asking whether LLMs have such properties are assuming them (e.g., ‘Do LLMs have musical talent’, ‘Do LLMs present empathy’, etc). This seems like...a very bad definition of "assuming" something? If I ask "do you know how to play the guitar?" I am absolutely not assuming that you know how to play the guitar!

Isn’t the entire paper is trying to point out that the second you ask the question “Do LLM have ”, you have to assume that they do, even before you make any assessment? Just because the person asking the question isn’t aware of they’re implicitly making that assumption, doesn’t change the fact that a logical assumption has been made. It just makes the questioner ignorant of the assumptions they’re making. Personally…

> the second you ask the question “Do have ”, you have to assume that they do

being able to imagine something doesn't mean believing in it?

I completely fail to understand the argument

I feel like there's some mistake in confusing 2 meanings of "assume" - one where it's close to 100% probability and one where it's close to 0% probability.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#27

Post by solid_fuel » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:51 AM UTC

golly_ned wrote: post #22

solid_fuel wrote: post #6

> In-game constructions of NAND gates and a perceptron (forward prop and training) as described in in 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'. Interesting concept > We begin by proving that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing- complete. Then we build a perceptron and a circuit to train it in-game. With that, we argue that changing the substrate (representation) of an LLM also al…

Please tell me your comment is satirical too?

You’ll need to be more specific?

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#28

Post by golly_ned » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:52 AM UTC

aesthesia wrote: post #16

sublinear wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still assuming the person is capable of playing the guitar. Does your fridge play the banjo? Doesn't make sense does it?

Yes, asking the question does assumes that the answer could be yes. It also assumes that the answer could be no. This is exactly the kind of scientific approach the paper claims we should take. So it's certainly a bit odd that the analysis approach the paper uses for its literature review---to claim that 57% of papers reviewed assume LLMs have anthropomorphic attributes---has "asks whether an LLM has an anthropomorph…

You're right that "assumes" might be misleading. Maybe "implies" would be more correct.

The point the author's trying to make is that if we state in a paper something like "the LLM understands, believes, thinks, ..." then we're supposing an intelligence much like our conception of a human intelligence. It's a form of 'begging the question' -- assuming what you're trying to prove.

It is not quite a fair argument, just because we don't have a precise vocabulary around how to talk about the activity of LLMs that doesn't involve making these loose analogies. Except for philosophers and people engaging in this kind of "is it truly intelligent or no" conversation, being imprecise in this way doesn't necessary have any cost, but is just a convenient way to avoid developing a jargon.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#29

Post by NooneAtAll3 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:01 AM UTC

sublinear wrote: post #12

aesthesia wrote: post #9

From the judge prompt in the paper: > Papers asking whether LLMs have such properties are assuming them (e.g., ‘Do LLMs have musical talent’, ‘Do LLMs present empathy’, etc). This seems like...a very bad definition of "assuming" something? If I ask "do you know how to play the guitar?" I am absolutely not assuming that you know how to play the guitar!

You're still assuming the person is capable of playing the guitar. Does your fridge play the banjo? Doesn't make sense does it?

> Does your fridge play the banjo? Doesn't make sense does it?

have you ever heard DnD story about gazebo?

if you don't know anything about something, anything is possible and everything can make sense

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#30

Post by sublinear » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

golly_ned wrote: post #28

aesthesia wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, asking the question does assumes that the answer could be yes. It also assumes that the answer could be no. This is exactly the kind of scientific approach the paper claims we should take. So it's certainly a bit odd that the analysis approach the paper uses for its literature review---to claim that 57% of papers reviewed assume LLMs have anthropomorphic attributes---has "asks whether an LLM has an anthropomorph…

You're right that "assumes" might be misleading. Maybe "implies" would be more correct. The point the author's trying to make is that if we state in a paper something like "the LLM understands, believes, thinks, ..." then we're supposing an intelligence much like our conception of a human intelligence. It's a form of 'begging the question' -- assuming what you're trying to prove. It is not quite a fair argument, just…

> we don't have a precise vocabulary...

We do, but much of computer science is still inaccessible to the layperson. The education gap only continues to grow.

I think it's surprising how much science jargon we've been able to cram into common english thus far without losing too many people. It just seems that, for now, LLMs are too convincingly close to science fiction for people to not be misled by their false intuitions and fears.