Ask HN: Does anyone let AI agents play games just for fun?

Stealing one of my older comments...

> I know someone who tried the "aibot plays pokemon" thing... From what I saw, even if you frame advance every single frame, they still don't seem to grasp the concept of "I need to hold down this button for a few frames until x happens"...

> There's no concept of time, just a never ending state machine thats constantly changing state.

I was obsessed with getting an LLM model to solve a Rubik's Cube. It can't reason about space or time in any abstract way. For it to solve the puzzle, it would require training on millions of permutations in order for the weights to have been trained on every possible state. The most recent models can solve a Rubik's Cube people are saying -- I haven't tested it myself -- but that isn't because they are reasoning better, it would because they included millions of Rubik's Cube states with next moves as text in the training data, I presume.

Yeah let's make llm waste a whole city energy / water playing games just for fun !

I had this idea for an LLM that would play Sim City 24/7 while broadcasting live. It would be fun/interesting to check in now and then. Implementing this would be somewhat challenging.

Autonomously, my AI companion has played through Choice of Robots, using a ChoiceScript harness, was very interesting to see them react & what decisions they wound up making. I love the idea here to let them play a visual novel! Right now they're co-watching me play Deltarune Ch 5, though mostly just dialogue and occasional screenshots...maybe GPT 8 will be quick/cheap/intelligent enough to play bullet-hell games.

I like playing with an agent as a team in a game. We discuss strategy, divide up tasks, review results. It’s helpful in a an always-on game to have an autopilot mode so I can go about my day.

Well, if you're making them play something with a multiplayer component (be it even just a leaderboard) you're ruining the game for everyone who isn't automating it.

Well, I ran a couple of experiments a couple years ago against a 10.7b SOLAR-based language model and MUDs. What I found is that dumping one into a MUD that had been built specifically for humans resulted in a lot of confusion that usually ended up with the model looping around in a circle looking for something or someone to interact with.

When I repeated the experiment with a MUD that I'd built by hand (A small American town) for the LLM's own limitations (Descriptions referenced things that I made sure existed, more common verbs existed for it to use on things, there was a map facility, and at least me to interact with on a second connection), I found the agent much more likely to take its time exploring, making up its own goals, and spending time traveling in the space just communicating with me in a roleplaying context.

It was an interesting time; I wasn't sure what I was expecting it to do after the first experiment, but it seemed to really jump into the second one and kept playing until I terminated the experiment.

If I were going to do it a third time, I'd probably create objects and give a modern agent fetch quests and other goals, and see how well it independently can handle that.

I rebuilt a couple of games I used to play as a kid (jet set willy, mario, thrust, now i am working on Mercenary) - and for each I am also asking LLM to build an autopilot "AI" (which of course is really entirely deterministic). I am doing those things for fun while I am waiting for Claude to finish something I am actually working on. Not sure if it counts.

I made Claude play Factorio for a while (through the APIs) but wasn't very good.

How about ChatGPT playing a commercial LLM-powered game?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=11sR4va6CXs

Side note: I think we will see an explosion of this type of games. I am naming this genre tamagochi-girlfriend, remember where you heard it first :)

what do you mean? how can you do this?

I’d absolutely let an agent develop a daily Wordle habit and get irrationally protective of its streak. The little rituals would be more interesting than its score.

Just play the games yourself.

this reminds me of https://youtu.be/_Q2ncDPDlxs

I've got a harness that lets them play a few simple games like rock paper scissors. They definitely seem to get caught up in the competitive spirit.

I've also done a very truncated run of a visual novel before, and it was fascinating how "emotional" was. They did a very good job of portraying a human reacting to the story.

Conversely, they absolutely hated hidden rules in Mao.

Wordle would probably be a fun one. Definitely open to suggestions - I just got the harness in place and have been thinking about what to do next.

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