I love what this project has done. Currently they're basically having to work around the architectural limits of the LLM in order to select salient memories, but it's still produced something very workable.
Language is acting as a common interpretation-interaction layer for both the world and agents' internal states. The meta-logic of how different language objects interact to cause things to happen (e.g. observations -> reflections) is hand-crafted by the researchers, while the LLM provides the corpus-based reasoning for how a reasonable English-writing human would compute the intermediate answers to the meta-logic's queries.
I'd love to see stochastic processes, random events (maybe even Banksian 'Outside Context Problems'), and shifted cultural bases be introduced in future work. (Apologies if any of these have been mentioned.) Examples:
(1) The simulation might actually expose agents to ideas when they consume books or media, potentially absorb those ideas if they align with their knowledge and biases, and then incorporate them into their views and actions (e.g. oppose Tom as mayor because the agent has developed anti-capitalist views and Tom has been an irresponsible business owner).
(2) In the real world, people occasionally encounter illnesses physical and mental, win lotteries, get into accidents. Maybe the beloved local cafe-bookstore is replaced by a national chain that hires a few local workers (which might necessitate an employment simulation subsystem). Or a warehouse burns down and it's revealed that an agent is involved in a criminal venture or conflict. These random processes would add a degree of dynamism to the simulation, which is more akin to the Truman Show currently.
(3) Other cultural bases: currently, GPT generates English responses based on a typically 'online-Anglosphere-reasonable' mindset due to its training corpus. To simulate different societies, e.g. a fantasy-feudal one (like Game of Thrones as another commenter mentioned), a modified base for prompts would be needed. I wonder how hard it would be to implement (would fine-tuning be required?).
Feels like I need to look for collaborative projects working on this sort of simulation, because it's fascinated me ever since the days of Ultima VII simulating NPCs' responses and interactions with the world.
Language is acting as a common interpretation-interaction layer for both the world and agents' internal states. The meta-logic of how different language objects interact to cause things to happen (e.g. observations -> reflections) is hand-crafted by the researchers, while the LLM provides the corpus-based reasoning for how a reasonable English-writing human would compute the intermediate answers to the meta-logic's queries.
I'd love to see stochastic processes, random events (maybe even Banksian 'Outside Context Problems'), and shifted cultural bases be introduced in future work. (Apologies if any of these have been mentioned.) Examples:
(1) The simulation might actually expose agents to ideas when they consume books or media, potentially absorb those ideas if they align with their knowledge and biases, and then incorporate them into their views and actions (e.g. oppose Tom as mayor because the agent has developed anti-capitalist views and Tom has been an irresponsible business owner).
(2) In the real world, people occasionally encounter illnesses physical and mental, win lotteries, get into accidents. Maybe the beloved local cafe-bookstore is replaced by a national chain that hires a few local workers (which might necessitate an employment simulation subsystem). Or a warehouse burns down and it's revealed that an agent is involved in a criminal venture or conflict. These random processes would add a degree of dynamism to the simulation, which is more akin to the Truman Show currently.
(3) Other cultural bases: currently, GPT generates English responses based on a typically 'online-Anglosphere-reasonable' mindset due to its training corpus. To simulate different societies, e.g. a fantasy-feudal one (like Game of Thrones as another commenter mentioned), a modified base for prompts would be needed. I wonder how hard it would be to implement (would fine-tuning be required?).
Feels like I need to look for collaborative projects working on this sort of simulation, because it's fascinated me ever since the days of Ultima VII simulating NPCs' responses and interactions with the world.