What is it: A neuroscience student created an AI-generated text adventure which rewrites itself one game at a time.
How: The game was built using a predictive neural network program called GTP-2. It is a creation of research company OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk. For the record, Musk has since left the company.
The game’s creator – Nathan Whitmore, a cognitive neuroscience PhD student at Northwestern University in IL, USA – explains that he wanted to put a spin on classic text adventure games by training GTP-2 on some, transcripts of older games. E.g. like these ones.
What are these: Remember those games where users control characters and navigate through a simulated environment through text commands? A game’s outcome depends on the decisions users make throughout the game. A concept, akin to interactive fiction, interactive narratives and role-playing game (RPG).
Mashing up a bunch of existing games, the program is able to create a new form of adventure, each time a user runs a new game.
“You can feed in the player’s current location and their action — [for example], ‘go east’ — and then you just ask GPT-2 to predict what text comes next, which is the consequence of that action. Then the player makes another action, and you have a game.”, says Whitmore quoted by Digital Trends.
It’s a matter of time before AI can do this in a video environment and consequently VR.
You can play the game here.
