Demis Hassabis: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So you said a lot of super interesting stuff there. So one, the open world, built into that is a deep personalization the way you’ve described it. So it’s not just that it’s open world, that you can open any door and there’ll be something there, it’s that it’s the choice of which door you open in an unconstrained way defines the worlds you see. So some games try to do that, they give you choice, but it’s really just an illusion of choice because you only, like Stanley Parable, a game I actually played, it’s really, there’s a couple of doors and it really just takes you down a narrative. Stanley Parable is a great video game. I recommend people play it, that in a meta way, mocks the illusion of choice, and there’s philosophical notions of free will and so on. But I do, one of my favorite games of Elder Scrolls is Daggerfall I believe, that they really played with a random generation of the dungeons of if you can step in and they give you this feeling of an open world. And there you mentioned interactivity. You don’t need to interact. That’s the first step because you don’t need to interact that much. You just, when you open the door, whatever you see is randomly generated for you. And that’s already an incredible experience because you might be the only person to ever see that. Yeah, exactly. But what you’d like is a little bit better than just sort of a random generation. So you’d like, and also better than a simple AB hard coded choice, right? That’s not really open world, as you say. It’s just giving you the illusion of choice. What you want to be able to do is potentially anything in that game environment. And I think the only way you can do that is to have generated systems, systems that will generate that on the fly. Of course, you can’t create infinite amounts of game assets. It’s expensive enough already how AAA games are made today. And that was obvious to us back in the nineties when I was working on all these games. I think maybe Black & White was the game that I worked on early stages of that, that had still probably the best AI, learning AI, in it. It was an early reinforcement learning system that you were looking after this mythical creature and growing it and nurturing it. And depending how you treated it, it would treat the villagers in that world the same way. So if you were mean to it, it would be mean. If you were good, it would be protective. And so it was really a reflection of the way you played it. So actually all of the, I’ve been working on simulations and AI through the medium of games at the beginning of my career, and really the whole of what I do today, it’s still a follow on from those early more hard coded ways of doing the AI to now fully general learning systems that are trying to achieve the same thing. Yeah, it is been interesting, hilarious, and fun to watch you and Elon obviously itching to create games because you’re both gamers. And one of the sad aspects of your incredible success in so many domains of science, like serious adult stuff, that you might not have time to really create a game, you might end up creating the tooling that others will create the game. You have to watch others create the thing you’ve always dreamed of. Do you think it’s possible you can somehow in your extremely busy schedule actually find time to create something like Black & White, an actual video game where you could make the childhood dream become reality?…

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