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Megaverse: Simulating Embodied Agents at One Million Experiences per Second
- shoto_io 5y agoMegaverse is such a great new buzz word. Love it
- thatjoeoverthr 5y agoI think it’s from Sailor Moon.
- spiritplumber 5y agoThat's Negaverse :)
- jcims 5y agoI thought that was Twitter
- bottled_poe 5y agomainly amongst the red-pillers.
- throwaway316943 5y agoYou mean black pillers?
- bottled_poe 5y agoSure, that too
- vbsteven 5y agoAlso very similar to Metaverse from Snow Crash.
- indigochill 5y agoSpeaking of which, I'm already sick of hearing Tim Sweeney call Fortnite "a metaverse" just because it's a cross-platform game. To me, metaverse (drawing from Snow Crash) means essentially "the WWW in 3D" which somehow we still don't have despite commercial approaches to that space such as Second Life and Roblox. The closest thing I know of is probably Croquet (the original project from Alan Kay and co, less so the commercial venture although I'm watching that with some interest as well) and its various spin-offs like Open Cobalt: virtual spaces hosted independently but with the capability to link to each other to compose a larger distributed virtual space, just like the world wide web.
- jimmySixDOF 5y ago>"the WWW in 3D" so like WebXR (& WebGPU is moving ahead too) a good example of whats possible is Vartiste [1], a 3D paint editor tool running in a normal browser on Pancake PC's or in any VR HMD [1] https://zach-geek.itch.io/vartiste https://zach-geek.itch.io/vartiste
- indigochill 5y agoI've poked around casually at the WebXR docs, but the main killer feature for me with Croquet et al was portals which would display the goings-on in a linked remote server in real time (you could even embed the full remote environment inside the local environment, sort of like the 3D equivalent of an iFrame). I guess WebXR's responsibility is the interface between XR and the web, and someone else would need to take on the synchronization task to achieve that.
- saddington 5y agoi'm working on a federation system for metaverse. yen.chat is an example.
- alex_petrenko 5y ago"Mega" just stands for 10^6 here, the simulation throughput :)
- thecupisblue 5y agoThis could turn out to be incredibly useful, will have to try it out. From self-driving simulations and agent training to human interactions and large ecosystem simulations. Could allow us to observe how patterns emerge in/between large agent groups (swarm intelligence is exciting!) and train our models in more complicated and collaborative tasks.
- shoto_io 5y agoI wonder, and that's really the obvious question since the Matrix and seeing how the field is developing : do we live in a simulated reality? Any chance we could find out?
- Phenomenit 5y agoIf you're inclined to believe that your senses are not hundred procent accurate than yes you live in a simulation created by your mind.
- blooalien 5y agoThere are entire highly interesting fields of study devoted to some of the many amusing ways our various senses (and the sometimes "flawed" ways our mind interprets those senses) are considerably less than a hundred percent accurate. Some of my favorites involve the various forms of visual illusions. :)
- vimacs2 5y agoIn orders of questions asked, probably not and probably not. There isn't really a particularly strong case to be made for the simulation hypothesis because it's unfalsifiable and the entire premise of it's alleged liklihood rests on some major assumptions with no evidence. The fact that it's been given more consideration than as an idle philosophical thought experiment has more to with our current's culture's fixation on computers than a particularly strong argument. The original thought experiment from Nick Bostrom has also at this point been paraphrased incorrectly by both Neil Degrass Tyson and Elon Musk so the public discourse surrounding it has lost much coherence.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI like your take on it. Unless the entities running the simulator directly enter the simulation and tell / show everyone that it is a simulation, we'll never know - and it won't actually matter. That said, it does make sense; do characters in The Sims as it is now, or as it may be in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years, know that they're living in a simulation? We're adding more and more computing power, and more and more details to our own simulations; at the current pace it seems to be a matter of time before we can simulate physics to the smallest quantum details, at an universal scale, at a fraction of the energy cost of our own universe. And maybe not real-time, but if we live in a simulation, who is to say that time as we experience it ourselves passes as fast on the "outside"? It could be that every second of our existence takes the equivalent of a hundred years outside of the simulation. But we're going down a philosophical rabbithole now.
- spiritplumber 5y agoThis makes me think of Hari Seldon's Prime Radiant.
- shadowfaxRodeo 5y agoI didn't really understand that article. But I did enjoy watching that jelly bean make its tower. I wish it well.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoLooks like it's maybe about genetic evolution of neural networks controlling bodies in a 3D simulation.
- Hendrikto 5y agoIt‘s Reinforcement Learning. In each state, the agent can choose from a set of actions. This leads to a state transition, and the agent gets a reward which it can use to adjust it‘s policy. A policy is just a conditional probability distribution over actions, given a state p(a | s).
- blooalien 5y agoHeheheh. Agree about the jelly bean. He was an industrious little digital creature. Amusing to watch in action. :)
- flohofwoe 5y agoHmm I guess I don't understand the point of the whole thing, but if they pitch "one million experiences per second" (whatever that means), they should better show some videos on the start page that have more than a few dozen dynamics objects in them.
- anentropic 5y agoPresumably the "one million experiences per second" is during the training phase, i.e. lots of runs of the agent simulated in parallel and/or faster than real time And then the videos show the end result of a single successful run of the trained agent, rendered to video
- alex_petrenko 5y agoYes, this is correct. A single compute node can run enough of these little environments in parallel to achieve 1M FPS throughput.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- voldacar 5y agoSus
- hoseja 5y agoamogus
- timpattinson 5y agois nowhere safe?
- abeppu 5y agoIn the first video, it looks like there are intersection issues (the block being carried by the agent appears to pass through other blocks). The agent hovers above the ground, and manipulates blocks but has no visible manipulators. When the agent drops several levels, I cannot tell if it is accelerating as it falls. So what do they mean exactly when they say this is a "physics-based simulation"?
- alex_petrenko 5y agoThere is a physics engine underneath, but the physics interactions are simplified for accelerated training. I.e. blocks that the agents carry can pass through other blocks, but the agents can't pass through blocks that are already placed. Such simplification allows the high throughput. There is a section in the article that explains the motivation behind this: there are a lot of questions in embodied AI that can be answered with such simplified simulators, i.e. you need something more complex than Atari, but you don't need the full complexity of the real world.
- babelfish 5y agoReminds me of the short-story "Lena" (discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835)