3 ms·

DeepMind Lab2D

49 points by martinlaz 6y ago

ipnon 6y ago
It seems like creating an API for your agent to train with can be as difficult an engineering problem as the machine learning itself.
- awal2 6y ago
  The fundamental truth of ML at the moment seems to be that gathering data takes at least as much effort and infrastructure (and often much more) than actually training the models.
29athrowaway 6y ago
It would be cool to have a UI like this. https://otoro.net/slimevolley/ https://otoro.net/slimevolley/
- befeltingu 6y ago
  That looks pretty slick... I dont know how much having a nice UI helps with understanding / training but it sure makes it nicer to work with and helps in demonstrating concepts.
jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Nice! Looks like it even does level generation. I’ll have to give this a closer look. I made a medium-popular scripting language/game-engine ( https://www.puzzlescript.net/ https://www.puzzlescript.net/ ) whose games are by chance in the domain of this framework. I wonder if it’d be worth it to try write a wrapper for it...
programd 6y ago
I've taken a look at the API for Lab2D and it's very abstract. What you have to work with are functions for strings, integers and floating point numbers glued together with callback functions and a bare-bones engine for running all of it through the equivelent of a game loop. In effect you have to define the meaning behind all those numbers and callback functions to create your own simulation. There are no pre-defined humans, robots, vehicles, generators, conveyer belts, minerals, etc for you to interact with. It's all very hardcore and suitable for numerical academic research, but IMHO not very accessible to a what I think is a fairly large audience which wants a ready made world in which to play with some AI agents. At least I assume that such an audience exists based on the many posts here mentioning personal AI projects. What I think is needed the equivelent of a game engine with an API allowing you to plug in AI models in place of the entities within it. Something similar to world games like Factorio, Rimworld, Hearts of Iron, Anno 1800, but with an API allowing you to create and control in-world assets. Something similar to the StarCraft API used by AlphaStar. I think we really need a standardized world sim as a server, equipped with some gRPC API to control its entities and get out information. You run your world sim on some machine or Kube cluster and interact with it via a well known API. Plug in whatever AI you need into the API spawn a couple million agents on a couple million tile world and off you go. I suspect you could do a very fast sim with modern multi-core desktop CPUs. Hmm, I am looking for an interesting project...
- mlyle 6y ago
  There's always crobots (c. 1985) / netrobots https://github.com/netgroup/netrobots https://github.com/netgroup/netrobots
- krasi0 6y ago
  You may be interested in BWAPI. An API for developing StarCraft 1 BroodWar AI. The community around it is amazing and there are a few yearly competitions. The current top bots are very strong already. https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi

49 points by martinlaz 6y ago

It seems like creating an API for your agent to train with can be as difficult an engineering problem as the machine learning itself.

awal2 6y ago
The fundamental truth of ML at the moment seems to be that gathering data takes at least as much effort and infrastructure (and often much more) than actually training the models.

29athrowaway 6y ago

It would be cool to have a UI like this. https://otoro.net/slimevolley/ https://otoro.net/slimevolley/

befeltingu 6y ago
That looks pretty slick... I dont know how much having a nice UI helps with understanding / training but it sure makes it nicer to work with and helps in demonstrating concepts.

jan_Inkepa 6y ago

Nice! Looks like it even does level generation. I’ll have to give this a closer look. I made a medium-popular scripting language/game-engine ( https://www.puzzlescript.net/ https://www.puzzlescript.net/ ) whose games are by chance in the domain of this framework. I wonder if it’d be worth it to try write a wrapper for it...

programd 6y ago

I've taken a look at the API for Lab2D and it's very abstract. What you have to work with are functions for strings, integers and floating point numbers glued together with callback functions and a bare-bones engine for running all of it through the equivelent of a game loop. In effect you have to define the meaning behind all those numbers and callback functions to create your own simulation. There are no pre-defined humans, robots, vehicles, generators, conveyer belts, minerals, etc for you to interact with. It's all very hardcore and suitable for numerical academic research, but IMHO not very accessible to a what I think is a fairly large audience which wants a ready made world in which to play with some AI agents. At least I assume that such an audience exists based on the many posts here mentioning personal AI projects. What I think is needed the equivelent of a game engine with an API allowing you to plug in AI models in place of the entities within it. Something similar to world games like Factorio, Rimworld, Hearts of Iron, Anno 1800, but with an API allowing you to create and control in-world assets. Something similar to the StarCraft API used by AlphaStar. I think we really need a standardized world sim as a server, equipped with some gRPC API to control its entities and get out information. You run your world sim on some machine or Kube cluster and interact with it via a well known API. Plug in whatever AI you need into the API spawn a couple million agents on a couple million tile world and off you go. I suspect you could do a very fast sim with modern multi-core desktop CPUs. Hmm, I am looking for an interesting project...

mlyle 6y ago
There's always crobots (c. 1985) / netrobots https://github.com/netgroup/netrobots https://github.com/netgroup/netrobots
krasi0 6y ago
You may be interested in BWAPI. An API for developing StarCraft 1 BroodWar AI. The community around it is amazing and there are a few yearly competitions. The current top bots are very strong already. https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi https://github.com/bwapi/bwapi