7 ms·

Can language models serve as text-based world simulators?

95 points by mpweiher 2y ago

Bluestein 2y ago
Nethack FTW :)
- ziggy_star 2y ago
  Seriously, ha, time is a flat circle.
  - anthk 2y ago
    I still love slashem.
xrd 2y ago
I made a D&D game for my kids using llama. It went surprisingly well. Lots of potential here. https://blog.katarismo.com/2023-05-26-i-m-a-dad-i-replaced-myself-with-an-llm https://blog.katarismo.com/2023-05-26-i-m-a-dad-i-replaced-m...
- xrcyz 2y ago
  FYI I'm getting ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID
klaussilveira 2y ago
This is neat. In theory, you could hook llama.cpp into into a GOAL-based planner (https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fear.pdf https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fea...) and have much better default bots navigating your nav mesh. Even better, if you record player actions as GOAL actions within the nav mesh, you can use that to fine tune the model. Or even feed it back in realtime so they learn the modus operandi of the player.
skybrian 2y ago
Maybe they can, but they’re trained on conversation and stories (among other things) rather than simulations. These are more general than the log of a simulation run in how they use time. Stories can be chronological, but they can also fill in the details in any order using things like flashbacks. Or they can get really complicated with time travel stories. So it seems like to understand a story well, an LLM would need a more sophisticated notion of time, where there is a history and events are slotted in as they’re learned from the narrative, and sometimes the whole history gets reinterpreted based on new information. (Plot twist!) It would be fascinating if some mechanistic interpretability researcher figured out how they actually work with story time. Are there the rudiments of that kind of understanding yet?
- crooked-v 2y ago
  Now I wonder what one would get from an LLM trained entirely on several bajillion text logs of people playing text games like Zork.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Yeah, might be interesting. I think it wouldn’t be too hard to generate training runs automatically, especially given a solution to start from.
lyu07282 2y ago
TL;DR: unfortunately the conclusion is, no they can't > the best recorded performance is 59.9% on accurately simulating state transitions [...] after 10 steps, average simulation accuracy would reduce to less than 1%. Our results indicate that LLMs are not yet able to reliably act as text world simulators
guestbest 2y ago
I think there is a MUD effort called LlamaTale which allows creation of this as telepresence. I’m trying to put a MUD together to try this out.
firtoz 2y ago
Would be interesting to see a version of this but incorporating tool usage features of the latest models.
gfosco 2y ago
Not by themselves... but with a good program built around it, managing the actual state, and very careful prompting, yes. I've been thinking about this for a while, always have the desire to make a game.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Exactly. I've been working on something like this for a while using finite state machines to control the prompts. The biggest struggle I've had is creating memory. It's one thing to save a list of events and feed it into the prompts, but there are always issues interpreting it and making sure the memories are detailed enough but not an entire page. For example, you "conquered the dungeon in level 1". If this gets saved as "conquered the dungeon" the next time you get to a new dungeon, it may think you already beat it and won't generate NPC monsters, that kind of thing.
  - chumpro 2y ago
    I am also working on something similar. I have written a grammar system for controlling the llm that is not context free. One of the main challenges is to have a database of what is reality, id -> object, and then have the llm return ids for objects referenced by the user. I am doing a system where something that has no id has not been created yet. I use story templates with labeled segments to create characters, items, location as well as events. Example: "Once upon a time there was a <role>cowardly knight</role> named <name>Billy Bonkers</name>. The named qualities become the data structure associated with the id of the new character. It can be hilarious to prompt the llm to do nerdy space humor! I seems to be very possible to create a "narrator driven" game happening in a "real" world. I plan on using a multimodal llm and all the stuff that is created will have an image. That combined with id-less objects existing but not having a detailed description will make qualities and objects visible in the created images also part of the world.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anthk 2y ago
Inform7 it's a beast and the resulting game can be run under a 486. No AI required.
d13 2y ago
Try it! All you need to do is type this into llama 3 8B or 70B 16fp instruct: “You are a text adventure game.” Done.
sk11001 2y ago
Recently I'm getting some strange behavior from ChatGPT (with GPT-4) where it outputs a code snippet in which it declares a variable, and then on the very next line it forgets the name of the variable and refers to it as something else. Or it refers to the variable but it makes a typo in the name. If that's the behavior by one of the best models on a few lines of code, I'm not hopeful for a world simulator any time soon unless we see another big leap in model quality.
- therobots927 2y ago
  I feel like it’s an open secret at this point that chatGPT is not useful for anything requiring consistent, logical thought which is a requirement for most human jobs.
- nodja 2y ago
  Chat GPT4 has been in general both better and worse than 3.5. I sometimes start a conversation with GPT4 and then have 3.5 fix it in another window (by pasting the code and pretending it's mine). It feels like things have degraded for coding tasks specifically, but the more recent knowledge of GPT4 is helpful if I'm asking how to use a certain library that's more recent as it won't just pretend the library exists, GPT4 is also much slower. I wish there was a ChatGPT 3.5 updated with more recent knowledge.
- catlifeonmars 2y ago
  Think about what the model is doing: It’s sampling from a statistical distribution of likely tokens, one of which is the correctly spelled variable name.
  - sk11001 2y ago
    My point is that in previous versions it was sampling more correctly more often than it has been recently.
    - rany_ 2y ago
      From what I've heard, the reason it's doing that is to add an AI fingerprint. It has to pick less likely tokens to encode this information to the detriment of the output quality. Unfortunately it's only hearsay but it made sense to me so I thought I'd share.
sbotzek 2y ago
I tried for a few months getting ChatGPT4 to work with a MUD. In my experience it's not very good at that particular task. One problem I ran into was its ability to logically connect rooms. In a MUD you navigate by going north, south, east, west, up, or down. Not every room lets you go any direction. And usually, if you go east, in your new room, you can go west. Rarely a level creator will make this not be true. ChatGPT4 was pretty bad at it though. Another problem was descriptions. It might mention a mountain in the distance once. But then never again. So this giant landmark was described in a single room. It was also difficult to get it to create a fair quantity of secrets in logical places. Lots of times it would just chain together multiple secrets in a single place. If you have more than one, you want to spread it around And finally, room layout. It tended to not be very good at this. Lots of linear layouts. It didn't have an eye towards when details should be complex rooms and when it can just be a line in a description. So it could do it, but it created levels that weren't very fun or particularly creative, even when it came to room descriptions.
- danjc 2y ago
  Somewhat related, Yann LeCun posted a few months back about how many concepts aren't understood through language and therefore can't be modeled through it (which is why LLM's are terrible with things like position and direction). https://x.com/ylecun/status/1768353714794901530?s=46 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1768353714794901530?s=46
  - Folcon 2y ago
    To people who claim that "thinking and reasoning require language", here is a problem: Imagine standing at the North Pole of the Earth. Walk in any direction, in a straight line, for 1 km. Now turn 90 degrees to the left. Walk for as long as it takes to pass your starting point. Have you walked: 1. More than 2xPi km 2. Exactly 2xPi km 3. Less than 2xPi km 4. I never came close to my starting point. Think about how you tried to answer this question and tell us whether it was based on language. Just quoting this here in case anything happens to the tweet... I agree with this, however I have one tiny nitpick, feel free to tell me if you think I'm wrong or being overly nitpicky, but the knowledge of the situation in which the phenomenon that he's describing occurs, I learned about entirely from language. So my ability to answer the question is based on that knowledge. I'm aware that the reasoning problem itself doesn't utilise it, but a position and direction system in and of itself arguably also suffers from being insufficient. I suppose I'm wondering if "setup" counts as needing language model?
enterexit 2y ago
Curious, can this objective be reworded as "How big a universe an LLM can serve to simulate?"
bbor 2y ago
Technically “text-based world simulator” pretty much is an explanation of LLMs already. That’s why we all suddenly care about dumb chatbots —- they accidentally cracked the frame problem.
P_I_Staker 2y ago
The answer is no
carabiner 2y ago
Too much data are locked up in non-public sources that still affect the world. You will not find complete engineering analysis reports for the Ford F-150 engine on the internet or full email exchanges for Trump's presidential campaign planning in Ohio. Yet these all influence us.
binary132 2y ago
Can headlines written in the interrogative case ever be answered in the affirmative?
- echelon 2y ago
  There exists at least one headline written in the interrogative case that can be answered in the affirmative.
  - moritzwarhier 2y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160410022155/http://ccdb5fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img/allpdf?199007095 https://web.archive.org/web/20160410022155/http://ccdb5fs.ke...
    - binary132 2y ago
      genius!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ninetyninenine 2y ago
The answer is yes. https://aidungeon.com/ https://aidungeon.com/ This actually came out before chatGPT and it floored me.
leonardspeiser 2y ago
I was able to get this to work with an LLM, but had to build some short term memory to keep awareness as you explored. The current site allows you to interact with an Oregon Trail or Zork like world, but you can specify any time in history and then it will create the stories and stay within that world. I also have it generate some images to go along with you for fun. https://grue.is/ https://grue.is/ (PS, I don't know how to code, so this is also proof that you can use an LLM to write all the software, here is my github if you are interested in learning more about that: https://github.com/lrspeiser/Grue.is https://github.com/lrspeiser/Grue.is)
w4ffl35 2y ago
I've already built things like this. Cool paper but I build things, put them to the side, never write a paper. Sometimes tweet about them. Then I see a paper later about some similar thing and the crowd goes wild. Not a complaint. Idk what else to say.

95 points by mpweiher 2y ago

Bluestein 2y ago

Nethack FTW :)

ziggy_star 2y ago
Seriously, ha, time is a flat circle.
- anthk 2y ago
  I still love slashem.

xrd 2y ago

I made a D&D game for my kids using llama. It went surprisingly well. Lots of potential here. https://blog.katarismo.com/2023-05-26-i-m-a-dad-i-replaced-myself-with-an-llm https://blog.katarismo.com/2023-05-26-i-m-a-dad-i-replaced-m...

xrcyz 2y ago
FYI I'm getting ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID

klaussilveira 2y ago

This is neat. In theory, you could hook llama.cpp into into a GOAL-based planner (https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fear.pdf https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/three-states-plan-ai-of-fea...) and have much better default bots navigating your nav mesh. Even better, if you record player actions as GOAL actions within the nav mesh, you can use that to fine tune the model. Or even feed it back in realtime so they learn the modus operandi of the player.

skybrian 2y ago

Maybe they can, but they’re trained on conversation and stories (among other things) rather than simulations. These are more general than the log of a simulation run in how they use time. Stories can be chronological, but they can also fill in the details in any order using things like flashbacks. Or they can get really complicated with time travel stories. So it seems like to understand a story well, an LLM would need a more sophisticated notion of time, where there is a history and events are slotted in as they’re learned from the narrative, and sometimes the whole history gets reinterpreted based on new information. (Plot twist!) It would be fascinating if some mechanistic interpretability researcher figured out how they actually work with story time. Are there the rudiments of that kind of understanding yet?

crooked-v 2y ago
Now I wonder what one would get from an LLM trained entirely on several bajillion text logs of people playing text games like Zork.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Yeah, might be interesting. I think it wouldn’t be too hard to generate training runs automatically, especially given a solution to start from.

lyu07282 2y ago

TL;DR: unfortunately the conclusion is, no they can't > the best recorded performance is 59.9% on accurately simulating state transitions [...] after 10 steps, average simulation accuracy would reduce to less than 1%. Our results indicate that LLMs are not yet able to reliably act as text world simulators

guestbest 2y ago

I think there is a MUD effort called LlamaTale which allows creation of this as telepresence. I’m trying to put a MUD together to try this out.

firtoz 2y ago

Would be interesting to see a version of this but incorporating tool usage features of the latest models.

gfosco 2y ago

Not by themselves... but with a good program built around it, managing the actual state, and very careful prompting, yes. I've been thinking about this for a while, always have the desire to make a game.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Exactly. I've been working on something like this for a while using finite state machines to control the prompts. The biggest struggle I've had is creating memory. It's one thing to save a list of events and feed it into the prompts, but there are always issues interpreting it and making sure the memories are detailed enough but not an entire page. For example, you "conquered the dungeon in level 1". If this gets saved as "conquered the dungeon" the next time you get to a new dungeon, it may think you already beat it and won't generate NPC monsters, that kind of thing.
- chumpro 2y ago
  I am also working on something similar. I have written a grammar system for controlling the llm that is not context free. One of the main challenges is to have a database of what is reality, id -> object, and then have the llm return ids for objects referenced by the user. I am doing a system where something that has no id has not been created yet. I use story templates with labeled segments to create characters, items, location as well as events. Example: "Once upon a time there was a <role>cowardly knight</role> named <name>Billy Bonkers</name>. The named qualities become the data structure associated with the id of the new character. It can be hilarious to prompt the llm to do nerdy space humor! I seems to be very possible to create a "narrator driven" game happening in a "real" world. I plan on using a multimodal llm and all the stuff that is created will have an image. That combined with id-less objects existing but not having a detailed description will make qualities and objects visible in the created images also part of the world.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anthk 2y ago

Inform7 it's a beast and the resulting game can be run under a 486. No AI required.

d13 2y ago

Try it! All you need to do is type this into llama 3 8B or 70B 16fp instruct: “You are a text adventure game.” Done.

sk11001 2y ago

Recently I'm getting some strange behavior from ChatGPT (with GPT-4) where it outputs a code snippet in which it declares a variable, and then on the very next line it forgets the name of the variable and refers to it as something else. Or it refers to the variable but it makes a typo in the name. If that's the behavior by one of the best models on a few lines of code, I'm not hopeful for a world simulator any time soon unless we see another big leap in model quality.

therobots927 2y ago
I feel like it’s an open secret at this point that chatGPT is not useful for anything requiring consistent, logical thought which is a requirement for most human jobs.
nodja 2y ago
Chat GPT4 has been in general both better and worse than 3.5. I sometimes start a conversation with GPT4 and then have 3.5 fix it in another window (by pasting the code and pretending it's mine). It feels like things have degraded for coding tasks specifically, but the more recent knowledge of GPT4 is helpful if I'm asking how to use a certain library that's more recent as it won't just pretend the library exists, GPT4 is also much slower. I wish there was a ChatGPT 3.5 updated with more recent knowledge.
catlifeonmars 2y ago
Think about what the model is doing: It’s sampling from a statistical distribution of likely tokens, one of which is the correctly spelled variable name.
- sk11001 2y ago
  My point is that in previous versions it was sampling more correctly more often than it has been recently.
  - rany_ 2y ago
    From what I've heard, the reason it's doing that is to add an AI fingerprint. It has to pick less likely tokens to encode this information to the detriment of the output quality. Unfortunately it's only hearsay but it made sense to me so I thought I'd share.

sbotzek 2y ago

I tried for a few months getting ChatGPT4 to work with a MUD. In my experience it's not very good at that particular task. One problem I ran into was its ability to logically connect rooms. In a MUD you navigate by going north, south, east, west, up, or down. Not every room lets you go any direction. And usually, if you go east, in your new room, you can go west. Rarely a level creator will make this not be true. ChatGPT4 was pretty bad at it though. Another problem was descriptions. It might mention a mountain in the distance once. But then never again. So this giant landmark was described in a single room. It was also difficult to get it to create a fair quantity of secrets in logical places. Lots of times it would just chain together multiple secrets in a single place. If you have more than one, you want to spread it around And finally, room layout. It tended to not be very good at this. Lots of linear layouts. It didn't have an eye towards when details should be complex rooms and when it can just be a line in a description. So it could do it, but it created levels that weren't very fun or particularly creative, even when it came to room descriptions.

danjc 2y ago
Somewhat related, Yann LeCun posted a few months back about how many concepts aren't understood through language and therefore can't be modeled through it (which is why LLM's are terrible with things like position and direction). https://x.com/ylecun/status/1768353714794901530?s=46 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1768353714794901530?s=46
- Folcon 2y ago
  To people who claim that "thinking and reasoning require language", here is a problem: Imagine standing at the North Pole of the Earth. Walk in any direction, in a straight line, for 1 km. Now turn 90 degrees to the left. Walk for as long as it takes to pass your starting point. Have you walked: 1. More than 2xPi km 2. Exactly 2xPi km 3. Less than 2xPi km 4. I never came close to my starting point. Think about how you tried to answer this question and tell us whether it was based on language. Just quoting this here in case anything happens to the tweet... I agree with this, however I have one tiny nitpick, feel free to tell me if you think I'm wrong or being overly nitpicky, but the knowledge of the situation in which the phenomenon that he's describing occurs, I learned about entirely from language. So my ability to answer the question is based on that knowledge. I'm aware that the reasoning problem itself doesn't utilise it, but a position and direction system in and of itself arguably also suffers from being insufficient. I suppose I'm wondering if "setup" counts as needing language model?

enterexit 2y ago

Curious, can this objective be reworded as "How big a universe an LLM can serve to simulate?"

bbor 2y ago

Technically “text-based world simulator” pretty much is an explanation of LLMs already. That’s why we all suddenly care about dumb chatbots —- they accidentally cracked the frame problem.

P_I_Staker 2y ago

The answer is no

carabiner 2y ago

Too much data are locked up in non-public sources that still affect the world. You will not find complete engineering analysis reports for the Ford F-150 engine on the internet or full email exchanges for Trump's presidential campaign planning in Ohio. Yet these all influence us.

binary132 2y ago

Can headlines written in the interrogative case ever be answered in the affirmative?

echelon 2y ago
There exists at least one headline written in the interrogative case that can be answered in the affirmative.
- moritzwarhier 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20160410022155/http://ccdb5fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img/allpdf?199007095 https://web.archive.org/web/20160410022155/http://ccdb5fs.ke...
  - binary132 2y ago
    genius!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ninetyninenine 2y ago

The answer is yes. https://aidungeon.com/ https://aidungeon.com/ This actually came out before chatGPT and it floored me.

leonardspeiser 2y ago

I was able to get this to work with an LLM, but had to build some short term memory to keep awareness as you explored. The current site allows you to interact with an Oregon Trail or Zork like world, but you can specify any time in history and then it will create the stories and stay within that world. I also have it generate some images to go along with you for fun. https://grue.is/ https://grue.is/ (PS, I don't know how to code, so this is also proof that you can use an LLM to write all the software, here is my github if you are interested in learning more about that: https://github.com/lrspeiser/Grue.is https://github.com/lrspeiser/Grue.is)

w4ffl35 2y ago

I've already built things like this. Cool paper but I build things, put them to the side, never write a paper. Sometimes tweet about them. Then I see a paper later about some similar thing and the crowd goes wild. Not a complaint. Idk what else to say.