Re:Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games
by proser on Monday January 03, 2022 @03:49PM
(#29786656)
There's a really interesting cross-over here with literary structure. You need to teach a model to recognize tone, theme, and setting in addition to world "facts."
What makes a world like Westeros different than the Shire isn't just facts like "seasons are really long" but elements of tension, political unrest, and the outlook of the people who inhabit it. To do this effectively, you need to be building simulations of literary works. There's always going to be an art to this, but instead of the manuscript, it's going to be about the parts of the model.
Re:Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games
by heyitsguay on Monday January 03, 2022 @03:59PM
(#29786791)
I think in the context of natural language for game worlds, "prose" is targeting the much lower bar of something that sounds like a human might write it, vs like "you PLACED KEY in THE LEFT DOOR. Proceed to A STAIRCASE" from games of yore. Understanding the much richer space of literary prose, such as the difference between the Shire and Westeros, seems like a harder problem, but also one that might be well suited for existing NLP training pipelines, because you can label a large amount of text with only a few descriptors. It might be tough to come to a consensus amongst literary experts what those descriptors should be, but e.g. if LOTR book 1 is "pastoral" and ASOIAF book 1 is "gritty", you've now got a lot of text associated to each of those labels. I wonder if anyone is working on this?
Re:Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games
by varelse on Monday January 03, 2022 @04:12PM
(#29786982)
SHRDLU was a simple world you could manipulate with English prose back in the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
Unless you feel you need flowery expressive input as well as output. But do we really need input more sophisticated than that of Zork here?
When you pair a better, prosier text input-response system with a procedural world model, if the procedural world model is built like existing ones you'll still have to deal with restrictions in the world's content and the valid interactions between constituents. At which point all that fancy AI makes for a more natural parser but doesn't add any richness to the game world, which is the thing we'd like to get at.
If anyone has ideas for how to solve the prose -> world model problem, that could be super fun and rewarding to work on, probably so much so that they wouldn't be sharing them here :(