Wouldn't a working approach be to just create a really low resolution 3D world in the traditional "3D game world" sense to get the spatial consistency. Then this crude map with attributes is fed into frame generation to create the resulting world? It wouldn't be infinite, but on the other hand no one has a need for an infinite world either. A spherical world solves the border issue pretty handily. As I understood it, there was some element of that in the new FS2024 (discussed yesterday on HN).
That's Minecraft. It does work. And when you turn around, then turn back to where you were facing, you don't feel like you're in a fever dream, because the landscape hasn't completely shifted.
The tech is neat and I'm sure worth publishing. The rhetoric accompanying it is terribly overblown. Of course that's as likely to be their University PR department as the authors.
If you go "ultra-low" resolution, that's basically Minecraft or Luanti (formerly Minetest). There some mods for Luanti that let one generate a less "squary" world by adding slopes, but that's still heavily polygonal.
> It wouldn't be infinite, but on the other hand no one has a need for an infinite world either.
Minecraft has an infinite world (with glitches when you go very far from origin due to floating point errors). Luanti's world is finite (around 64000 m^3 because 16 bits coordinates; players move at 2-4m/s usually), some people are working to make it infinite. In my opinion, you are right that nobody needs an infinite world; the argument for an infinite world is that a finite world can be a problem on popular servers but in my eyes servers where this is a problem don't use enough the available space (in particular the huge vertical space that can be used to create multiple worlds) or shoot themselves in the foot by providing players with ways to move fast (mainly transports); increasing the player's speed actually shrinks the world.
I think there is a conundrum from the players and gameplay perspective. On one hand, you want a lot of space, but on the other hand you want to be close to other players (for commerce, play together, etc.). It's not enough to have an infinite world, you also have to have the gameplay that goes with it.
Another thing to consider are the interaction of mobiles (NPCs, enemies) with the terrain. Because nobody likes an infinitely empty world either. I haven't played an AAA game recently, but a decade ago even with precomputed terrain, some mobiles would look silly sometimes with steep terrains.
We have the part which controls your muscles and we have another part which simulates the movement. Not executing on it has nothing to do with the brain stem disconnecting from the 'body'.
Its the same mechanism as you thinking about a movement but not doing it.
Many people occasionally experience the transition between "conencted" and "disconnected" states as a sudden jerk or loud noise just at the moment of falling asleep.
Sleep paralysis is another "failure mode" of this mechanism that reveals what's going on. (I'm not sure if there is a reverse to it, i.e. whether sleepwalking could be explained as a drastic fail-open of the same mechanism).
This sudden jerk you can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk and its not scienctificly clear why and how it works, the best assumption is that its a reflex.
You are not disconnecting your brain from anything.
Does the brain change in response to that sleep period? Or is there no change because there's no new information input?
I _feel_ older than I am because there are a couple extra decades in my brain than in real life. Most of my time compression experiments were only a few months or weeks. That one long one changed me forever, and I've never done it on purpose since then.
I still have time compressed dreams from time to time, and when I wake up, two or three weeks have subjectively passed, but only a night has passed in the real world. There's a period of time, no more than 10-30 minutes, while the brain tries to reconcile two different and overlapping pasts. It can be a bit disorienting. My wife knows when I have these dreams because when I wake up, she says I look around surprised or confused to be there. The absolute worst is when you lay down to go to bed in the dream and wake up in the real world. Those will mess you up.
So, maybe my brain did change. Who knows? Maybe someone should study it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/comments/30t9k...
Thanks for share.
The trick to time compression in dreams is two things:
- being able to generate false memories
- being able to skip the passage of time
It requires acknowledgment that there is no proof you existed 5 minutes ago, only your memories of existing (and surviving the existential crisis that may cause) matching up with the current perceived reality. So, to have a time-compressed dream means to simply 'skip ahead' for a period of time and have access to the memories in-between. This last part is the part that needed the most practice for me. I was able to skip ahead, but it took years before I'd be able to create false memories with coherency. These days, it isn't uncommon to have a dream with an entire lifetime of memories that aren't mine. Luckily, these are forgotten within seconds of waking up, making it easy enough to determine which of my dreamt experiences are fake and which are real.
On a normal night, you only have a couple of hours to dream (more or less depending on sleep deprivation and need for deeper sleep). So it works kinda like a movie that covers a greater period of time, skipping ahead to the interesting parts. Then the access to the memories in-between the interesting part to make decisions and sense out of what you are experiencing.
A traditional neural network is a universal function approximator, however it is not recursive in nature, unless it is some sort of RNN. The transformer architecture, which this seems fairly similar to this one, is also not recursive in nature; although I believe, limited recursion can come about through CoT.
Therefore, I don't believe this could match the reproducibility, in an infinite sense, of a traditional procedural generator.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4
If you want to learn more about the fascinating world of fractals.
Its other mapgens massively some kind of Perlin noise in various ways, so that you can have "realistic" landscapes (e.g. the Carpethian mapgen) or landscapes with impossible mountains and floating rocks sometimes (e.g. the V7 mapgen) that are good for fantasy/sci-fi worlds.
Noise is a pretty efficient way to fake complexity, and it's not a coincidence [2].
[1] https://www.luanti.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
I am guessing the main thing holding this stuff back in terms of fidelity and consistency or generalization is just compute. But the new techniques they have here have just dramatically lowered the compute costs and increased the generalization.
Maybe just something like the giant Cerebras SRAM chips will get to the next 10 X in scale that smooths this out and pushes it closer to Star Trek. Or maybe some new paradigm like memristors.
But I'm looking forward to within just a few years being able to put on some fairly comfortable mixed reality glasses and just asking for whatever or whoever I want to appear in my home (for example) according to my whim.
Or, train it on a lot of how-to videos such as cooking. It just materializes an example of someone showing you exactly what you need to do right in your kitchen.
Here's another crazy idea: train on videos and interactions with productivity applications rather than games. In the future, for small businesses, we skip having the AI generate source code and just describe how the application works. The data and program state are just stored in a giant context window, and the application functionality changes the instant you make a request.
Still, would be super cool to try
I wouldn’t be surprised if epic has similar.
Though we were using map tiles at the time, we were developing a model that took photos and a GPS track to add information that better matched environmental conditions (cloud, better lighting, etc).
People still ask me to open-source or give them our source code, but the code was acquired, so that isn't possible. But I do regularly say that if I were to rebuild Ayvri today, I'd do it as an interactive video rather than loading tiles.
Clicking - nothing works.
Could be total vaporware for all we know.
It is an ad, a statement of achievement in case someone else states it first, or what?
Seems like it would be better on Youtube, it really doesn't offer much of use right now.
Personally, these were the kind of glitches which made games feel magical and "real" to me as a kid. Being able to analyze a system by breaking it made it seem so much more tangible, like an actual place I had an NTSC-sized porthole into.
MissingNo. is another good example. I have fond memories spending untold hours in my favorite game engines trying to break free. The Jak and Daxter series were some of my favorite to break, due to the uniqueness and flexibility of the engine and the weird ways that the chunk loading system could be broken.
I think this is one thing about Super Mario Bros. 3 that felt so magical to me. With the addition of the hidden whistles and intentional "glitches" like crouching for an extended time on a white platform, running behind map elements, etc. you felt like some kind of plane walker just bending time and space to your will. Fantastic implementation of a level skip mechanism for veteran players. It gave an already incredibly expansive game quite a lot of extra replay value, just like Minus World.
I was extremely poor growing up but I did get lucky and get a Gameboy Color for Christmas with a copy of Pokémon Gold at age 5, right before my guardians went insane and forbade any non-Christian media such as "Pocket Demons" or any fantasy content. That game expanded my mind so much, introduced me to a lot of things I'd never encountered before. It seemed so mysterious and huge, especially with the entire extra Kanto campaign. Still one of the greatest and most complete games ever made.
Interestingly, this website does remind me of something I played a while back - check it out! [https://slowroads.io/]. It has roads!
We talk about a lot of things here, but when we do talk about AI, we tend to prefer talk about things with code or papers.
This particular project has a paper. They're expecting to publish their code soon.
Here's the paper:
https://thematrix1999.github.io/article/the_matrix.pdf
You don't have to read it, but you may want to consider it if you want to learn something and/or contribute something meaningful to the conversation.