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I get that you want to save the world by reducing processing, and I agree that using an LLM to develop deterministic and efficient code is just a better idea ov
by rimesforfree 10mo ago
I get that you want to save the world by reducing processing, and I agree that using an LLM to develop deterministic and efficient code is just a better idea overall, but “stop using natural language interfaces” is overly restrictive.
Interactive fiction / text-adventures written in the 20th century used a deterministic natural language interface with low load as an intentional flexible puzzle to solve, so the problem today is efficiency.
You could just as well argue to stop using modern bloated operating systems, websites, and apps. I understand that the processing required for LLMs can be much higher. But the side-effect of additional power needs will be a global push for more energy, which will result in more power stations being available for future industries once LLMs become more efficient.
If you want to reduce complexity overall and have simple, flexible interfaces and applications that use fewer of the worlds resources, I’m all for it. But don’t single out LLMs assuming they will always be less efficient. Cost will drive them to be more efficient over time.
- charcircuit 10mo ago>As a clear obvious example: interactive fiction / text-adventures use a deterministic natural language interface with low load as an intentional flexible puzzle to solve. Even though games can technically do this, should they? Do consumers actually find it fun and engaging? Considering there has never been a AAA game of that genre I don't think there is true consumer demand for games with such an interface.
- infocom 10mo ago> never been a AAA game Infocom sold 450k copies of Zork I and 250k copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide among their many other titles. Beam Software sold over 1M copies of The Hobbit. Sierra On-Line sold ~400k copies of King’s Quest VI in a week.
- charcircuit 10mo agoThose games did not have a high enough budget to be considered AAA.
- cubefox 10mo agoThat's just their nature: they are very inexpensive to make. The original question was whether people find them fun and engaging. Clearly they did in the past. Though nowadays their standards have risen a lot. Even graphical adventure games (like Monkey Island) have long fallen out of favor due to a lack of action elements.
- fennecfoxy 10mo agoAnd did the concept of "AAA" truly exist back then? Let alone "AAAA"? It's not really a good benchmark, imo.
- charcircuit 10mo agoPulling up games from decades ago instead of the last few years isn't a good benchmark either especially considering the technical limitations that existed at that time.
- croon 10mo agoI'm the last person to propose more LLM usage, but there is a reason DnD has exploded in popularity in recent years despite fancier games and graphics existing, and it's not because people find text/story telling restrictive on an immersion or technical level. If a Zork was released today with a hypothetical adaptive parser with world coherent output (big ifs) I think it'd be a huge hit personally. Though to be clear, I'm not saying someone could build it on an LLM. As long as people still enjoy books I believe they will still want to interact with it if possible.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoAll of this subthread comes from an attempt to refute the statement, "Considering there has never been a AAA game of that genre...". Never is a long time. However, now we're arguing the counter-examples aren't "AAA games".
- charcircuit 10mo ago
- DrScientist 10mo agoIndeed. "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" or "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" became early memes as a result. However those memes also come from player frustration of being stuck in repeated patterns. The same can also happen with chat interfaces to LLMs. However I'm not sure whether that's a function of the chat interface or the nature of LLMs.
- anthk 10mo agoIf you think the Infocom games were like Zork I-III you don't understand how the ZMachine itself was improved over the years upon creating masterpieces such as Trinity or A Mind Forever Voyaging. Then Curses!/Jigsaw are something else, and Anchorhead/Spider and Web/Inside Woman/All Things Devour are the king of games with thematics you won't see in 3D AAA games in decades. And over the years the parser from Zork was so improved that could do chained phrases in English in the 90's on a 16 bit machine with the Z5 version of the Z-Machine with games designed for it. For Z8 machine games, the size of the games was even higher with far more objects and interactivity for puzzles thanks to Inform6 and Inform6lib depending on the build target.
- DrScientist 10mo agoNot knocking them - I played the Hobbit on a machine with 48K memory and the game included graphics! It was a marvel of it's day. Just musing that some of the frustration I found playing them is reminiscent of trying to wrangle many billions of parameter models today.
- anthk 10mo agoI played Spanish IF games too from the ZX, but emulated, with PAWS (the adv system) adapted into Spanish. As the English grammar it's simpler than the Spanish one and the words are shorter, you could put tons of in game content and potential actions and effects; that's why The Hobbit shines. Altough further Spanish games were much better, such as Aventura Espacial.
- anthk 10mo ago>never an AAA game From the non-Infocom titles: - Curses! - Jigsaw - Anchorhead - Slouching towards Bedlam - Spider and Web and literally dozens more of outstanding quality. From Infocom, most titles will qualify.
- cubefox 10mo agoAre there any successful examples of LLM text adventures? Last time I heard someone here said it's hard to develop robust puzzles and interactions, because it's hard to control and predict what the LLM will do in a dialogue setting. E.g. the user can submit reasonable but unintended solutions to a puzzle, which breaks the game.
- croes 10mo agostop using natural language interfaces is just a hyperbole.
- IAmBroom 10mo agoWell, maybe an overreaching generalism. Not really hyperbole.
- cess11 10mo ago"Cost will drive them to be more efficient over time." Why are you certain of this? It's just a database. Does this hold for e.g. Postgres?