Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 387 posts

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#341

Post by HKH2 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #260
hx8 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way? Maybe. One aspect of Wolfenstein and Doom's popularity is that it was years ahead of everyone else technically on PC hardware. The other aspect is that they were genre defining titles that set the standards for gameplay design. I think Doom Deathmatch would have caught on in 1995, as there really were very few (just Command and Conquer?)…

I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…

> but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing"

There's still a lot of chatter breaking the continuity. In the original, the plot was entirely made up of what you were experiencing directly.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#342

Post by rowanG077 »

lukeschlather wrote: post #295
rowanG077 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the paper? It had access to the dota 2 bot API, which is some gamestate but very far from all gamestate. It also had artifially limited reaction to something like 220ms, worse then professional gamers. But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. It's perfectly valid to judge the best an AI can…

> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per…

No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess. By doing that you would even forget the rules of chess. At best a tiny subset of neurons could be used for that.

I wouldn't have expected for anyone to even attempt to argue a human can beat, or even approach, a computer on working memory. Wikipedia is just 24.05gb. You are somehow claiming here that a human can hold that in working memory. That is they read it once and have perfect recall. Not even the most extreme savants have shown such feats.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#343

Post by CyberDildonics »

sturob wrote: post #329
leoc wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also, he didn't do the technically hardest and most impressive part, Quake, on his own. IIUC he basically relied on Michael Abrash's help to get Quake done (in any reasonable amount of time).

Realizing that he needed Abrash (and aggressively recruiting him) could easily be seen as the most impressive thing he did to make Quake happen

I would say his multiple technical feats and phenomenal output are more impressive.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#344

Post by johnb231 »

dumdedum123 wrote: post #290
WithinReason wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Graphics Carmack" is a genius but that doesn't mean that "AI Carmack" is too.

Exactly. I know him and like him. He is a genius programmer for sure BUT people forget that the last successful product that he released was Doom 3 over 20 years ago. Armadillo was a failure and Oculus went nowhere. He's also admitted he doesn't have much of math chops, which you need if you want to make a dent in AI. (Although the same could have been said of 3D graphics when he did Wolfenstein and Doom, so perhaps…

Rage was released in 2011. His work at Meta produced highly optimized standalone VR. Whether you think it's successful or not, the tracking accuracy and latency is extremely competitive.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#345

Post by [deleted] »

leoc wrote: post #307
LarsDu88 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about Carmack in the 90s... There was a lot of research going on around 3d graphics. Companies like SGI and Pixar were building specialized workstations for doing vector operations for 3d rendering. 3d was a thing. Game consoles with specialized 3d hardware would launch in 1994 with the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (in Japan only for one year) What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on…

But also, he didn't do the technically hardest and most impressive part, Quake, on his own. IIUC he basically relied on Michael Abrash's help to get Quake done (in any reasonable amount of time).

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#346

Post by ddingus »

Narishma wrote: post #318
LarsDu88 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…

> The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Rayman was a 2D game.

It is. I have experienced others reference it as an early 3d Title too.

Great work by that team! Seriously. The graphics are great, and for the time period, excellent enough to be lumped in with the real 3d games.

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#347

Post by LarsDu88 »

HKH2 wrote: post #341
LarsDu88 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…

> but even developers of the more recent DOOM games have started to realize that they should return to the original formula of "blast zombies in the face at high speed, and keep plot as window dressing" There's still a lot of chatter breaking the continuity. In the original, the plot was entirely made up of what you were experiencing directly.

In the ending of the original game, you kill the demon spider brain robot thing and the demons kill your bunny rabbit. That's the plot

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#348

Post by LarsDu88 »

Narishma wrote: post #318
LarsDu88 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the thing about rapid change is... it's hard to imagine what kind of games would exist in a DOOMless world in an alternate 1995. The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Star Wars Dark Forces with its own custom 3d engine also came out. Of course Dark Forces was, however, an overt clone of DOOM. It's a bit ironic, but I think the gameplay innovation of DOOM tends to hold up more…

> The first 3d console games started to come out that year, like Rayman. Rayman was a 2D game.

I'm misremembering Rayman for the Sega Dreamcast. Looking at wikipedia, I now see that there weren't many games in 1995 even on the new consoles that really leveraged the 3d hardware. The PC actually had more such games despite many PCs lacking hardware acceleration for 3d rendering or even significant floating point capabilities. There's Sega Rally Racing for the Saturn, Virtua Fighter, Tekken...

Perhaps it's really 1996 that's the real turning point (with Mario 64 coming out), which makes DOOM about 3 years ahead of its time. And of course id shipped Quake that year....

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#349

Post by ddingus »

tirant wrote: post #298
fennecfoxy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it could very well exceed our capabilities beyond our wildest imaginations. Because we evolved to get where we are, humans have all sorts of messy behaviours that aren't really compatible with a utopian society. Theft, violence, crime, greed - it's all completely unnecessary and yet most of us can't bring ourselves to solve these problems. And plenty are happy to live apathetically while billionaires become t…

I still don’t see an issue of billionaires becoming trillionaires and being able to buy hyper luxury goods. Good for them and good for the people selling and manufacturing those goods. Meanwhile poverty is in all time lows and there’s a growing middle class at global level. Our middle class life conditions nowadays have a level of comfort that would get Kings from some centuries ago jealous.

I do haveba problem with that.

Basically, if we are going to allow single humans to have so much buying power, that needs to come with some clear expectations.

Risks must be taken. Pick something and advance society. Or, empower others in a reasonable, non discriminatory way, with no hooks.

There are a ton of things need doing.

Why not require a real effort?

We do not need more dynasties, and other enduring signs of wealth.

We do need those people to have earned it. (That is the no dynasty part again)

I know sounds harsh, but the fact is anyone can live very well for the rest of their lives on just a fraction of that money.

May well put it to work.

And if it were me personally? I got a list. Ready?

Re: John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025

#350

Post by hnaccount_rng »

ewoodrich wrote: post #197
sigmoid10 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every day has 86400 seconds during which a human brain constantly adapts to and learns from external That's not even remotely true. At least not in the sense that it is for context in transformer models. Or can you tell me all the visual and auditory inputs you experienced yesterday at the 45232nd second? You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. That has a sample…

> You only learn permanently and effectively from particular stimulation coupled with surprise. This is just, not true. A single 2min conversation with emotional or intellectual resonance can significantly alter a human’s thought process for years. There are some topics where every time they come up directly or analogously I can recall something a teacher told me in high school that “stuck” with me for whatever reaso…

But that resonance is a form of surprise. You are just using different words for the same context. At the same time: You are correct in the sense, that this "surprise" is completely ignored by today's LLMs. They only use this in training mode and not for continuous learning. Whether one can find a sufficiently useful definition of "surprise" to use auxiliary "learning systems" (vector DBs or system prompts) has yet to be shown
Post reply on HN