4 ms·

Does it provide screenshots of the game state? I, too, would struggle to play the game pretty effectively if I could not visually see the game.

noddybear 2y ago
Agents don't have access to screenshots, as we are purely evaluating text-only models. All reasoning is conducted over object representations of the game (with positions etc). I have anecdotally tried using screenshots to help models debug their factories, but without training a custom CNN/ViT on the Factorio UI, the visual outputs miss critical things (e.g gaps in transport belts). That said, we have demonstrated via unit tests that the API is technically sufficient to progress to a rocket launch alone. We have been able to complete most lab tasks using the API ourselves so the humans still have a hefty lead here! The ones that we didn't do are the late-game lab tasks, which would have taken significant time and which frontier models are far from being able to complete.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Noddy, what’s “fair game” for this benchmark? e.g. do you wish to provide frontier models with a text goal, tooling info, and leave it at that? Or do you wish to have agent architectures compete? It seems to me like tiering the goal setting, layout and implementation are all separate tasks that would benefit from different agents.
  - noddybear 2y ago
    The idea is for us to track all frontier models using the basic agent (goal, tooling info), and then offer another leaderboard for different agent architectures (with retrieval etc).
martbakler 2y ago
Just to jump in here as one of the authors We designed the API to be as spatially descriptive as possible (include x-y coordinates and neighbors in game state descriptions) and the agents have tools to aid them in carrying out actions which would benefit from vision (i.e find buildable areas on the map with different sizes, placing entities next to other entities etc). As Jack said, we completed most of the lab tasks manually ourselves and while it took us a lot longer compared to having vision, the tasks were still doable and the human performance is significantly higher than current agents. We are thinking of supporting vision for future evals but from a small number of tests we ran, current models got even more confused as the number of entities on the map grows quite quickly. This is likely due to VLMs being notoriously bad at visual reasoning on images with lots of detail and in a game where one misplaced entity in a large factory breaks everything, the errors start to compound
- Hammershaft 2y ago
  Someone below mentioned the ASCII interface for dwarf fortress as being ideal for this, and I wonder if that kind of representation with a legend might produce spatially better results. The drawback I see is that elements can be layered on a tile in Factorio, or have properties that are not visually obvious in ASCII, so the llm would need to be able to introspect on the map.
  - noddybear 2y ago
    I think your intuition is correct about the amount of information that needs to be encoded into an ASCII char. You could potentially use unicode to pack more more into each char, e.g direction, type, status etc. Or make each representation available on-demand, i.e 'show me the direction of all inserters in a 10 tile radius'.
    - vessenes 2y ago
      Well we learned last month on HN that you can encode arbitrary data into Unicode; anecdotally, o3-mini-high at least could decode it if given instructions. I wonder what a quick way to calculate how many Unicode characters you’d need is.. I guess every entity + four orientations. Underground belts and pipes seem tough. But I guess you could just add an encoding showing if the square has an underground pipe or encoding. I propose this would work. I think I’ll give it a try today.. I’d love dwarf fortress factorio. That said, the encode/decode phase seems like a lot of tokens for a model that’s not trained to understand the Unicode ‘map’. Seems like you’d want to fine tune something at least. Maybe a layout model.
      - noddybear 2y ago
        Checkout the 'ObserveAll' tool in the repo - its deprecated now, but it pipes all the raw entities on the map back to the agent. You could procedurally convert it to unicode format given a pre-defined codebook (which you give to the agent) before letting the agent observe and reason over it.

noddybear 2y ago

Agents don't have access to screenshots, as we are purely evaluating text-only models. All reasoning is conducted over object representations of the game (with positions etc). I have anecdotally tried using screenshots to help models debug their factories, but without training a custom CNN/ViT on the Factorio UI, the visual outputs miss critical things (e.g gaps in transport belts). That said, we have demonstrated via unit tests that the API is technically sufficient to progress to a rocket launch alone. We have been able to complete most lab tasks using the API ourselves so the humans still have a hefty lead here! The ones that we didn't do are the late-game lab tasks, which would have taken significant time and which frontier models are far from being able to complete.

vessenes 2y ago
Noddy, what’s “fair game” for this benchmark? e.g. do you wish to provide frontier models with a text goal, tooling info, and leave it at that? Or do you wish to have agent architectures compete? It seems to me like tiering the goal setting, layout and implementation are all separate tasks that would benefit from different agents.
- noddybear 2y ago
  The idea is for us to track all frontier models using the basic agent (goal, tooling info), and then offer another leaderboard for different agent architectures (with retrieval etc).

martbakler 2y ago

Just to jump in here as one of the authors We designed the API to be as spatially descriptive as possible (include x-y coordinates and neighbors in game state descriptions) and the agents have tools to aid them in carrying out actions which would benefit from vision (i.e find buildable areas on the map with different sizes, placing entities next to other entities etc). As Jack said, we completed most of the lab tasks manually ourselves and while it took us a lot longer compared to having vision, the tasks were still doable and the human performance is significantly higher than current agents. We are thinking of supporting vision for future evals but from a small number of tests we ran, current models got even more confused as the number of entities on the map grows quite quickly. This is likely due to VLMs being notoriously bad at visual reasoning on images with lots of detail and in a game where one misplaced entity in a large factory breaks everything, the errors start to compound

Hammershaft 2y ago
Someone below mentioned the ASCII interface for dwarf fortress as being ideal for this, and I wonder if that kind of representation with a legend might produce spatially better results. The drawback I see is that elements can be layered on a tile in Factorio, or have properties that are not visually obvious in ASCII, so the llm would need to be able to introspect on the map.
- noddybear 2y ago
  I think your intuition is correct about the amount of information that needs to be encoded into an ASCII char. You could potentially use unicode to pack more more into each char, e.g direction, type, status etc. Or make each representation available on-demand, i.e 'show me the direction of all inserters in a 10 tile radius'.
  - vessenes 2y ago
    Well we learned last month on HN that you can encode arbitrary data into Unicode; anecdotally, o3-mini-high at least could decode it if given instructions. I wonder what a quick way to calculate how many Unicode characters you’d need is.. I guess every entity + four orientations. Underground belts and pipes seem tough. But I guess you could just add an encoding showing if the square has an underground pipe or encoding. I propose this would work. I think I’ll give it a try today.. I’d love dwarf fortress factorio. That said, the encode/decode phase seems like a lot of tokens for a model that’s not trained to understand the Unicode ‘map’. Seems like you’d want to fine tune something at least. Maybe a layout model.
    - noddybear 2y ago
      Checkout the 'ObserveAll' tool in the repo - its deprecated now, but it pipes all the raw entities on the map back to the agent. You could procedurally convert it to unicode format given a pre-defined codebook (which you give to the agent) before letting the agent observe and reason over it.