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Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization

github.com

41–50 of 173 posts

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

#41
post #21

This seems very cool - I am sceptical of the supposed benefits for "civilization" but it could at least make for some very interesting sim games. (So maybe it will be good for Civilization moreso than civilization.)

Yeah, I was dissapointed (and thrilled, from a p(doom) perspective) to see it implemented in Minecraft instead of Civilization VI, Humankind, or any of the main Paradox grand strategies (namely Stellaris, Victoria, Crusader Kings, and Europa Universalis). To say the least, the stakes are higher and more realistic than "lets plan a feast" "ok, I'll gather some wood!" To be fair, they might tackle this in the paper --…

Rather, a concept of a preprint

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

#42
post #26

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" v…

Memory is really interesting. For example, if you play 100,000 rounds of 5x5 Tic Tac Toe. Do you really need to remember game 51247 or do you recognize and remember a winning pattern? In Reinforcement Learning you would based on each win revise the policy. How would that work for genAI?

[deleted]

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

#43

I've reviewed the paper and I'm confident this paper was fabricated over a collection of false claims. The claims made are not genuine and should not be taken at face value without peer review. The provided charts and graphics are sophisticated forgeries in many cases when reviewing and vetting their applicability to the claims made. It is currently not possible for any kind of LLM to do what is being proposed, while…

> this paper seems indicate that election-related activities were coordinated by groups of AI agents in a simulation

I mean, that's surely within the training data of LLMs? The effectiveness etc of the election activities is likely very low. But I don't think it's outside the realms of possibility that the agents prompted each other into the latent spaces of the LLM to do with elections.

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

#44
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these projects are inch deep into intelligence and miles deep into the current technology. Some things will see tremendous benefits but as far as artificial intelligence we’re not there yet. Im thinking gaming will benefit a lot from these..

You mean we're not there in simulating an actual human brain? Sure. But we're seeing AI work like a human well enough to be useful, isn't that the point?

Not if we’re pretending it is any inteligent. Other than that I’m all in for new utility to come out from it. But I do see a lot of tangents off technology with claims to something it is not. I have no problem of calling that out. Why do you mind? Just ignore me if Im holding your enthusiasm back, there’s plenty of sources to provide that for you.

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

#45
post #8

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.

Game designers have barely scratched the surface of NPC modeling even as it is. Rimworld is considered deep but it's nothing close to it.

Yeah I think there is a lot of potential here.

Especially in city building games etc.

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

#46

They probably will fall fast into tragedy of the commons kind of situations. We developed most of our civilization while there was enough room for growing and big decisions were centralized, and started to get into bad troubles when things became global enough. With AIs some of those "protections" may not be there. And hardcoding strategies to avoid this may already put a limit on what we are simulating.

> We developed most of our civilization while there was enough room for growing and big decisions were centralized, and started to get into bad troubles when things became global enough.

Citation needed. But even if I will get on board with you on that, wouldn't it be to start developing for global scale right from the start, instead of starting in small local islands and then try to rework that into global ecosystem?

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

#47

This looks like it is a really cool toy. It does not strike me as particularly useful from a scientific research perspective. There does not appear to be much thought put into experimental design and really no clear objectives. Is the bar really this low for academic research these days?

it looks like a group consisted largely of ex-academics using aspects of the academic form but they stop short of framing it as a research paper as-such. they call it a technical report, where it's generally more okay to be like 'here's a thing that we did', along with detailed reporting on the thing, without necessarily having definite research questions. this one does seem to be pretty diffuse though. the sections on Specialization and Cultural Transmission were both interesting, but lacked precise experimental design details to the point where i wish they had just focused on one or the other.

one disappointment for me was the lack of focus on external metrics in the multi-agent case. their single-agent benchmark focusses on an external metric (time to block type), but all the multi-agent analyses seems to be internal measures (role specialization, meme spread) without looking at (AFAICT?) whether or not the collective multi-agent systems could achieve more than the single agents on some measure of economic productivity/complexity. this is clearly related to the specialization section but without consideration of the whether said emergent role division had economic consequences/antecedents it makes me wonder to what degree the whole thing is a pantomime.

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

#48

This looks like it is a really cool toy. It does not strike me as particularly useful from a scientific research perspective. There does not appear to be much thought put into experimental design and really no clear objectives. Is the bar really this low for academic research these days?

Keep in mind anyone can publish on Arxiv and it's not at the top of HN on the merit of its research contributions.

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

#49

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" v…

So a modernized version of Spore.

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

#50

This looks like it is a really cool toy. It does not strike me as particularly useful from a scientific research perspective. There does not appear to be much thought put into experimental design and really no clear objectives. Is the bar really this low for academic research these days?

it looks like a group consisted largely of ex-academics using aspects of the academic form but they stop short of framing it as a research paper as-such. they call it a technical report, where it's generally more okay to be like 'here's a thing that we did', along with detailed reporting on the thing, without necessarily having definite research questions. this one does seem to be pretty diffuse though. the sections…

wouldn't surprise me if in a few weeks/months we see this repo packaged up as a for-sale product for the games industry
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