This was a fun read. But some of the things attributed to a glitchy AI are just normal Minecraft stuff. For example: "One time I was swimming across a lake and noticed that the reflections at the water's edge were looking weirdly spiky." That's kelp, it looks like that in the game because the chunks beyond haven't loaded so it stands out from the sky. Also, the "natural blocks of rare glowstone" are honeycomb blocks, which she thinks might be new "cheese" blocks but in fact have been in the game for over five years.
I think there is a generation of Minecraft players that participated in the alpha, beta, and early 1.0 releases and then grew out of it. For these people, "in the game for over five years" is basically the same as "new".
(I belong to that group. I recently started introducing my four-year old to Minecraft and there is so much stuff that was not there when I played!)
Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game.
Part of it is because 80%+ of my playtime was before they were added, but I think another part of it is that those things have never really quite fit into the game in my mind.
>Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game.
Same, one of my kids will randomly want me to play and I'm constantly surprised by some 'new' thing that's literally been in the game for 10 years. It's kinda cool that minecraft has existed as a thing for basically my kids' entire lives, and oldest is in college now.
The End is akin to an inside joke or maybe a pun. You cannot finish a sandbox game, so Notch deliberately added a dimension that you have to go out of your way for, that is difficult to find, unless someone tells you or you read about it. The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game.
You can say "I've reached the end of Minecraft" and it is true by the letter of the words, but untrue by the spirit of the words. Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.
I remember there used to be some writing by Notch on Minecraft's website that went something like (paraphrasing from memory):
"When thinking about whether to make the game easier or harder, I generally lean towards harder. This might make the game frustrating if there isn't some sort of goal, so I think I will have to build in a goal for players."
I'm sure this passage is long gone, I unfortunately don't have time to go digging through the Internet Archive right now. But I assume this "goal" become The End.
> The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game.
Do you have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it.
> Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.
In theory, maybe. But in practice? The mere existence of a tangible end goal fundamentally changes the way people approach the game, even if there's more to do beyond it.
I agree with this in general but I don't think minecraft falls into this trap because beating the ender dragon is so anticlimactic and trivial that it doesn't feel like you accomplished much. In terraria, an ostensibly similar sandbox game with a much more linear progression, if I beat the final boss, I really do feel like there's nothing else to do and stop playing that world. In modded minecraft packs with quest books, it's the same thing. But in vanilla minecraft, beating the ender dragon is just something you do because you want elytra wings.
Beating the dragon is very anticlimactic, but it's still the "end" of the progression path as designed by the developers. Or at least it was before the Elytra was added, now that's the actual end.
But either way, reaching that end goal usually prompts people to ask themselves: "what now?" Once you have an Elytra, you've basically unlocked creative flight in survival, and that's pretty much where survival itself ends, now you're just playing creative except you still have to grind for building materials. There's no better item to go for, so what's the point? Most people stop playing shortly after, and this is where the whole "2 week Minecraft phase" thing originates from.
I've actually never beaten the Ender Dragon in Vanilla. But, I've killed lots of Ender Dragons in modpacks, and occasionally either: There is no Ender Dragon, the pack doesn't need this so it's elided entirely or, that's where you start so the Ender Dragon is an early fight.
For example Star Factory clearly doesn't need an Ender Dragon fight, there are no bad guys at all, you're making a factory. For stars.
"The End" is clearly as much as anything a joke, the original game didn't have an end and so people asked for one, OK, here's "The End" for whatever that's worth.
I would say it's less of a defined end than that: it basically only exists because Notch was coming up to the official non-beta release and felt like there should be something resembling an ending to the game if he was going to call it 'done'. (and then later on more stuff was added 'after the end': the end dimenson was initially only the island and the dragon)
Vanilla factorio is a myth. Factorio without mods, like KSP without mods, is only played by people without internet connections. The DPRK probably has a thriving vanilla factorio community!
Some people don't mod games. I, for example, want to play (and enjoy and judge) exactly what the dev team intended, and if I don't like it, I drop the game. I played vanilla Skyrim, vanilla Minecraft, vanilla Stalker and many more games that are famous for their mod community.
But I'm also an Apple user and I mostly game on PlayStation, so it's probably just part of my personality somehow.
Nah, I'm a die-hard Linux user that's been running heavily customized Arch for as long as it's been around, and I have the same attitude towards games. Spent countless hours in Minecraft¹, zero desire to mod it.
¹: with a good internet connection that's been used to download podcasts to go along with it
I think this is an interesting take to have beneath a comment about Factorio, considering the new DLC of Factorio (Space Age) is basically a more polished version of a popular mod (Space Exploration) to the extent that Wube hired the mod creator to help them build their first DLC.
That feels compatible with my approach. The mod obviously fits the devs' vision, which makes it canon to me. Especially when it fits so much that they hired the modder.
...interestingly, I have basically the same attitude as you, except with game guides instead of mods. Using a guide means playing a game contrary to what the developer intended. Outside of exceptional circumstances, if a game isn't fun without a guide, I drop the game†.
—except, Minecraft totally breaks that! You can't really play Minecraft without a guide, how would you even make a crafting table? Maybe you could figure it out after hours of hitting your head against the wall, but it wouldn't be a good experience.
But what is the intended way to play Minecraft? Should the Minecraft Wiki be considered part of the game?
(Note: I haven't played Minecraft in years, so I'm referring to Minecraft 1.0 more-or-less.)
----
† However, asking friends in real life is allowed, because sharing knowledge and discoveries within a group is a fun social experience. Except, what if someone else previously referenced a guide? Have they poisoned the well? I think about these things far too often and still don't have good answers.
Hard agree, modding is what makes games fun. What is the point of playing a game that I can't change the rules, the "board" and everything else? What the devs made I see it more as a canvas, a framework, a suggestion.
Exactly. I do this with boardgames too, beyond just "house rules".
For me, Stratego, my favorite chess-esque battle simulator, is a wonderful canvas.
The game becomes infinitely better when players roll for the number of turns each player gets. This simulates the moving "tempo" of war, speeds up the game dramatically depending on the turn multiplier used, and dramatically opens up the types of play available. I've experimented with far more, including custom maps, allowing joint attacks with multiple turns (pooling attack scores), and other mods.
I don't care if this is autism or it turns off normies. The thinkpad user ricing out modded dwarf fortress has a more rewarding time with their videogames compared to macbook pro user playing vanilla skyrim in 2025.
> thinkpad user ricing out modded dwarf fortress has a more rewarding time with their videogames compared to macbook pro user
Ok, now I feel a little bit offended by the bread thing, and also: how can you just assume how rewarding my experience is playing vanilla games? We’ve already established, that you can’t relate to me.
Minecraft has been around for more than 15 years, and the game was already fully recognisably itself by around 2012. There's 13 years of additions that will always feel mostly unnecessary to many players.
These people will have to buy a second account because Microsoft up and deleted them when they bought Minecraft, and haven't been sued yet. If you were paying attention at the time they offered a migration process for Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts... and then turned it off because 'fuck you that's why'.
Instead, people are apparently suing them because Microsoft banned gun mods.
Also they added their god-awful Microsoft SSO to Minecraft which, coupled with the Xbox app means that you have to be careful with the sequence of action when requesting a password change otherwise the whole thing will just go blank and not let you reset.
My partner and I are each on our second copy because at some point it was just not worth the hassle of recovering our old accounts.
If you actually begin the steps of suing them in small claims court (which after the dropping of mandatory arbitration clause, is the official dispute mechanism for Minecraft), suddenly support has no problem giving you your account back.
If you bought the game back in the Notch-owned Mojang days, you have a license guaranteeing your right to access all future Minecraft versions. It's a pretty open-and-shut case.
>These people will have to buy a second account because Microsoft up and deleted them when they bought Minecraft, and haven't been sued yet. If you were paying attention at the time they offered a migration process for Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts... and then turned it off because 'fuck you that's why'.
I'm pretty sure you have literal years to migrate. I suspect you still can if you contact their support.
I sure did contact support and they told me to pound sand.
For an organization of Microsoft’s size, to be so incompetent at migrating accounts was a choice. If their underlying system was incapable of linking the product to my account, they could have just emailed brand new codes to everyone registered with the “lifetime” mojang entitlement.
Same. They asked for proof that I bought it, I sent the PayPal transaction ID and then they went like "lol we don't actually have any records from back then."
I made a hacked version of the old launcher after that and now a couple friends and colleagues and I run a custom server and play on that occasionally.
Possibly, they did provide notice and time to migrate your account. But if you didn't read news on the launcher or didn't see a headline (both very possible if you wheren't playing at the time) you would have just 'lost' your account (practically just not legally, they changed the terms post purchase). If you have had the account from before M$ bought Mojang and just now realized you cant log in, it was this.
This was me. Played the beta for a little bit, didn’t find what was there very compelling and stopped with the year.
A decade later it turns out my sister got into it that she had a realms server with friends and I joined. Basically a completely different game, which is mostly a positive.
Though mojang really needs to fix inventory management bullshit, which is not fun. There are many more possible items now, but with the same inventory space as the game started with, meaning anything you do results in inventory constantly filling up.
Item sorters are great for storage, but don't help with the mess of items that end up in your inventory if you're exploring, or building. And while shulker boxes help a little, a) they're an end-game item and b) they are a pain to use if you're switching items often (place down shulker box, swap your inventory items with those in the box, mine the box, every time you need an item that's not in your inventory).
This does not address the fundamental problem of having just 27 inventory + 9 hotbar slots over 1000 possible items (which is constantly increasing) that can be picked up, many of which don’t even stack, and having to manually move things where you want them.
Dealing with that turns exploring+looting into the promise of a grinding chore unless you simply don’t collect things. Which will hurt during future building projects.
I would not enjoy a game where I manually swapped out memory to disk. Yet often games demand the same as part of their “gameplay”.
This exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if most HN readers had played a bit of Minecraft 13 to 15 years ago and still represent Minecraft like that even after all that time. I'm definitely one of those BTW.
Same here. Played a lot of it in a brief moment some 13 years ago, then never touched it again. Villagers and stuff is still strictly in the "new" category for me.
Infinidev here :) It's wild to think that some people played Minecraft, had kids, and some of their kids are older than I was when I started playing Minecraft.
I first played Minecraft when Notch was posting demos as zip files on the TIGSource forums. I playtested and kept playing off and on until a little after the 1.0 release but that was still over 10 years ago. Some of the early demos also had object impermanence. You would leave a chunk and when you went back to it, it had been re-generated.
The most surprising thing about GTNH, to me, is how much of "vanilla minecraft" is already present in 1.7.10 and how relatively minor the changes since then (except the resizing of the world) have been.
2015 was past the halcyon days of modding because of the big update that broke half the mods. ~2011 was when you had great mods like Industrial Craft 2. /oldmanyellsatcloud
For what it's worth, I'm fully aware of honeycomb blocks and have played Minecraft recently, but I've never seen a honeycomb block in person. It's entirely possible she plays casually or has played casually recently but doesn't engage with media or wikis enough to know about blocks that she hasn't had reason to see.
That's pretty much how my dreams work. For example, I can read in my dreams (like signs, books), but it's almost always one word at a time, and the rest of the text becomes impossible to focus while I'm reading that word, no matter how hard I try. It's like the "permanence module" is disabled and my brain falls back to a primitive generative AI for the next frame. And, I can't reason about the logic of my experience, the lack of causality, or persistence of objects at the time. Everything feels "as they should be" despite how awkward things get. I guess that's why nightmares are so convincing or hard to get out of, because I can't reason about them. The whole article feels like describing a typical dream to me.
> I can read in my dreams (like signs, books), but it's almost always one word at a time, and the rest of the text becomes impossible to focus while I'm reading that word, no matter how hard I try. It's like the "permanence module" is disabled
Techniques for lucid dreaming rely on this fact for you to be able to "detect" that you are in a dream. There is one where you need to look at time, look away and look again. The time will change or be in an impossible format if you're dreaming. Then if you're aware you're dreaming you can start to "control" the dream.
Recently I found myself looking at an old alarm clock with a seven-segment display, but the segments were lit up arbitrarily, making an unreadable pattern instead of a time. But then I remembered, oh yeah, that's right, I do have a broken old alarm clock that does that, it's probably just that, I'm not dreaming. And I fell back into the dream.
The funny thing is, I really do have an old alarm clock that does that. It's the most useless alarm clock ever, because not only can it not tell you the time, it can't even tell you if you're awake.
I've found your brain is extremely quick to jump to conclusions in a dream. It's surreal sometimes where random connections like your alarm clock suddenly come out of nowhere and draw you back in.
What really gets me sometimes is when the dream comes with a 'historical context' that serves as a false memory. For example, dreaming I'm on a ship, and I 'remember' that I've been on it for months.
Funny enough, I never really needed these tricks. Or I guess, I do have one? It's when I realize the events are scripted. I don't know why, but many of my dreams are perfectly sensical and linear, and sometimes I notice and hijack them. What I can do with them tho, depends on how close I am to waking up.
Saddest one was when I realized I was walking my dead dog. She was actually exhibiting behaviors I know she had been used to have, but not ones I had consciously remembered much when thinking about her after her death. I lingered on that one a bit. Still, dreams are dreams, and there was some weirdness, and I knew them for what they were. But that time, I did not fight the script.
That's a good way of putting it. In the past when I realized I was dreaming, I would take advantage of the situation and change things, give myself superpowers, etc. But in recent years my few lucid dreams have had really interesting plots, so I consciously chose to let things be and just see where they go.
I can relate. I saw my dead dog several times in my dream, and in the dream, it felt like she was never dead in the first place, not like I reunited with her, but it was just another of those regular days with her. So, even though I enjoyed the dream, I didn't have that euphoric joy of reuniting with her. I perceive everything as 100% absolute truth and only realize what's wrong after I wake up.
> There is one where you need to look at time, look away and look again. The time will change or be in an impossible format if you're dreaming.
I did a bunch of lucid dreaming when I was younger (seems it was a lot easier then?), and even knowing things like that can end up making sense in the dream, you sometimes end up thinking "Well, it kind of makes sense the time went from 11:00 to 14:00 when I looked away, I did look away for quite a while".
For people who haven't lucid dreamed before, it might sound simple and almost stupid, but a lot harder when you're trying to look at your watch and everything makes sense but also not.
The key to lucid dreaming for me is to question reality regularly, and as a result do things in waking life to test if I'm dreaming. About once a month I will legitimately wonder whether I'm dreaming and press my hand into a solid object expecting my hand to sink into it. This has helped me go lucid in a dream a few times. It's made me seem nutty a few more than that.
The way you described is only one technique, and lucid dreams obtained with this technique have a false positive rate higher than wake-induced (WILD) methods. These false-positives are normal dreams masquerading as lucid. An example is flying like superman “because you know you are in a dream and you can do anything” in order to get the milk from supermarket because your dream-wife told you there is no milk in the kitchen. See the logic error?
>Techniques for lucid dreaming rely on this fact for you to be able to "detect" that you are in a dream.
I wish I could figure out how to do that, anytime I'm dreaming all the weird inconsistencies and people morphing from one person to another and such all just seem to be normal.
Yeah, I can't detect it at all. When dreaming, everything feels 100% real despite how unrealistic it gets: my vision is blurry, it's always in a darker hue even in the daylight, colors are grayish, i can't reason, my long term memory doesn't work, objects don't stay where they are, no logic to anything, sounds are weird. Yet, I can't tell if it's a dream. I can't even think about whether it's a dream or not. My reasoning module doesn't function. If things become so stressful, I wake up, but that's about it.
My experience with nightmares has largely been that a part of my subconscious is trying to conduct the dream in an "exciting" direction, to engender thrill on a par with a carnival ride .. but then it slips or gets out of hand and turns into a spiral of self-fulfilling terror instead.
I feel like ruminating on that process some during waking time has helped my dream producing instincts to instead steer away from unnecessary sources of fear often before I even perceive (during the dream) that things might have been about to get scary (though I'm often able to assess that pattern after the fact).
> It's like the "permanance module" is disabled and my brain falls back to a primitive generative AI for the next frame.
What if there is no such module and whenever you believe you have experienced permanence it is because your brain confabulated it from what it actually observed?
I'd still call that permanence module :) AFAIK, that the way our vision works is that our eyes only see a narrowly focused region in detail and the rest of our periphery is generated by our brain (based on what we saw there before). There are optical illusions based on that.
> AFAIK, that the way our vision works is that our eyes only see a narrowly focused region in detail and the rest of our periphery is generated by our brain (based on what we saw there before).
I know it's a over-simplification, but maybe too much of it? 100% of your periphery isn't "generated" by your brain based only on what you've seen before, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to see stuff "at the corner of your eyes" or "looking while not looking" where you can see stuff without actually focusing straight on on the thing itself.
Except for those times when you're facing off against creatures that can keep track of your saccades, as to move only during the brief moments your brain is ignoring input from your eyes.
There's a bit in Ender's Game where he plays this computer game that has a dreamlike quality to it. It seemed it could simulate a response to any player action, and continue the story along that path. I think in the book it was a tool for introspection, like dreams can be? I can't really remember.
Anyway, as a kid I thought, silly author, that's not how computer games work. But it turns out Orson Scott Card is smarter than me. Give this kind of thing a few years and we'll have it.
This reminds me of dreaming. Either there's a similarity between dreaming and what this AI is doing or my human brain is stereotypically finding patterns where there are none.
Yeah, I tend to agree. I think there is a familiarity and if you read up on how AI generates images it kind of works like that where it builds and amplifies noise or existing structure as a seed of a plausible image. Our perception of reality probably works like this except we are getting some good consistent information from our eyes - using the same apparatus with blank inputs or noise or shifting memories then you get some interesting output.
> the first step in our research towards more complex interactive worlds
As we know, object permanence is not really needed in any videogame, so this makes sense. It's also easy to add in, they just didn't do it because they didn't feel like it.
Snark aside, not sure what that is supposed to mean. This isn't interactive in the same sense that games are, its not a world because it doesn't have any properties of a world, its just a video generator you can steer with keys. Cool, but not what we would call an interactive world
I would argue that a video generator you can steer with keys is an interactive world. In this case the way you "steer" has a direct effect on your experience which makes it, in my sense, interactive.
> Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
I highly recommend this to anyone reading HN. I wouldn't say it changed my life, but I think about Borges and Fictions/The Aleph at least once per year.
I would say that TUOT is absolute essential reading (even more than the -- justifiably -- better-known Library of Babel), since the fact that things disappear unless kept in memory is exactly how the digital world works.
> One time I was swimming across a lake and noticed that the reflections at the water's edge were looking weirdly spiky.
This is probably the model trying to generate kelp is the ocean. When water is in chunks on the edge of the loaded world, you can see through the water to the sky at that angle, so you also see the outline of the kelp kinda like that.
This is pretty common to see in the game nowadays, but the AI model might be having a hard time since kelp was only added a few years ago and isn't as well represented in the training data.
> The problem, as far as I can tell, is that if all this works perfectly, this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run. The original Minecraft is already infinitely playable, thanks to the way it randomly generates a 7x-larger-than-planet-Earth landscape with each new game. You can't use generative AI like this to get a new kind of game, only a better simulation of the game you trained it on.
Oh come now, that's not true and is showing a lack of imagination, especially from someone who's been covering generative models this long. There's lots of things you can do with an accurate differentiable model of Minecraft - just like there's lots of things you can do with a LLM or a diffusion model beyond just 'generate a random sample'. (Just think about all the things you can do with CLIP steering a diffusion model...) Imagine describing GPT-3 as saying 'as far as I can tell, if this all works perfectly, this will simply be Common Crawl, except far more expensive to read'!
The AI dungeon thing is a salient point - GPT2 (which it started out with) could barely make a coherent paragraph, and GPT3 could write about half a page of text that more or less made sense.
With modern LLMs, they still get occasionally tripped up, but you could go for pages without a minor detail not making sense.
Something similar might happen with these game models, given enough time.
AI Dungeon was the text equivalent of the Minecraft thing in TFA. I still remember the distinct feeling I had after getting immersed in the interactive story experience for an hour - for the rest of the day, I felt like I woke up from an intense fever dream.
That's the difference between a deterministic and a stochastic system. Using one where you need the other leads to exactly these kinds of results. Recent trend in LLMs is to gravitate towards more determinism (like fact checking), I'm afraid in the end we will come full circle and end up with a fancy frontend to a database.
Janelle Shane’s work has been really inspiring. Her talk at Strange Loop from a couple of years ago — right before DALL-E, before ChatGPT — was a turning point, and very funny:
As far as I can see, the demos in the blog post are cherry-picked. In most cases that I tried the model could not understand that I just mined a block and it should go to my inventory. Still very impressive.
Man, I’m glad I’m using paper straws and turning off the PC the second I leave the room for the environment while some "researchers" elsewhere waste god knows how many kWh for a barely functional "AI" version of a game. ♥
So the AI is trained from the previous frame and the input and tries to predict the next frame, correct?
How could you achieve object permanence this way? Will it 'automatically' appear given more training data or more hidden layers? How is this handled in other approaches?
If training is indeed done on frame + input, any information that isn't in either of those data sources is simply not there.
To achieve object permanence, there needs to be some persistent off-screen data from frame to frame. There's a way to achieve this: train on frame+input+woldstate -> frame+woldstate
But then you can’t just give the previous frame, with the LLM analogy you would have to give the last few thousand frames (that’s the context window, right?). If you only give the previous frame, that’s like having an LLM that only gets the single previous token and has to predict the next one.
Indeed. Although more recently they figured out a way to feed the hidden state as the new input, which basically allows the model to "continue thinking" in vectors without round-tripping it via words (or pixels).
Presumably if you were to take that and build a large enough NN to accommodate all the necessary state it needs to carry and all the rules it needs to be able to execute, then after training it on enough game input you'd have a proper world simulation. Of course, as the article rightly notes, then you have just successfully reimplemented Minecraft in a way that is orders of magnitude more computationally expensive...
Perhaps the trick used by text-based LLMs could be used: when the context window starts filling up, the LLM is asked to summarize the existing data in the context, thus compressing it (lossily..) into smaller space.
More previous tokens in this case would mean more previous frames. But there's really no reason to just stick to rendered pixels as input (except for novelty's sake) because we could train directly on snapshots of full game state.
I'm guessing the author didn't play Cyberpunk at launch -- the cars and pedestrians would blink out of existence if you turned around. I couldn't help but think that Rockstar had figured this out 19 years prior in GTA3. :/
Flicking the camera down to despawn cars is a common trick in speedrunning those 3d GTA games. They did it better than cyberpunk, but it was not figured out.
To me AI generated videos (this kind) makes my brain untwist its wrinkles. I've seen this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jd-Rr9cJYo - a Minecraft gamer plays the Oasis AI version. There is literally zero coherence and dreamy trippy style
Maybe this is extrapolating a bit too much from this, but this would be sort of neat as a game streaming compression system right? If the service only needed to send a frame every 1-2 seconds, and the interim could be interpolated locally, still but still processing key strokes, it might be juuuuust smooth enough to not notice. Sort of like DLSS, but game specific, and "upscaling" a frame over time instead of resolution.
That is of course dependant on running inference locally being somehow less intensive than just running the game. But there we go, it's an interesting thought at least!
As a longstanding Minecraft player, that's played less and over the years, I simply don't know how I feel about this.
A side of me hopes that this technology gets used to drive progress in self-driving cars, robotics etc. My intuition says that having a sandbox that looks similar yet functions unexpectedly could greatly help with sniffing out edge cases.
On the other side I fear that this ends up in the next generation of social media - never ending generative short-form content. Obviously, in its current state the effects on the brain regarding object permanence could be... devastating?
>I fear that this ends up in the next generation of social media - never ending generative short-form content.
Tiktok already is never ending generative short form content, it's just humans doing the grunt work of figuring out which video performed well and making more like it or pushing the weighting of what they think made it successful higher.
Apparently Oasis Minecraft is what's called a Markov process: The next state only depends on the current state, but not on the past states. To "fix" this, Oasis Minecraft would need a memory of the past frames.
Slightly (or very) off topic, but I think it fits so I will write what I feel about people talking about their AI experiences. Feel free to ignore my opinion. I just wanted to know if there is anyone who feels the same way.
Listening to someone talk about "their chat with ChatGPT" etc. feels very annoying. It's like they are explaining a dream they had in detail but even less informative or useful because a dream might suggest something about their state of mind. However, content like this (to be fair, this specific one isn't that annoying to me especially compared to "AI said this and that" kind of stuff) has absolutely no constructive value (to me) and feels almost schizophrenic. Maybe I feel this way because people around me, unlike the average HN user's social circle, have only superficial idea about how AI works but are very interested in using it.
I think he means that the brain does exist, but that our brains don't have a perfect model of the real world or physics, hence our dreams look like this.
Also, in a way, comparing GenAI/LLMs to how our brain neural nets work (which isn't exact, but have similar outputs).
What fascinates me about this is this is what dreams are like. The human brain tries to loosely predict reality, leading to object impermanence and all kinds of trippy weirdness we call dream logic.
It’s also why writing good fiction is hard. You have an idea and try to put it down and it’s a mess because your idea is just a loose prediction of what you want to achieve. Then it has to be thought out deliberately or the edges don’t meet up. I’m sure the same goes for painting, etc.
The idea always starts as a mess. Putting it to paper is a sort of gradient descent to make it less messy. Like many optimization algorithms it's an iterative process
