Ask HN: Does anyone let AI agents play games just for fun?

Well, I ran a couple of experiments a couple years ago against a 10.7b SOLAR-based language model and MUDs. What I found is that dumping one into a MUD that had been built specifically for humans resulted in a lot of confusion that usually ended up with the model looping around in a circle looking for something or someone to interact with.

When I repeated the experiment with a MUD that I'd built by hand (A small American town) for the LLM's own limitations (Descriptions referenced things that I made sure existed, more common verbs existed for it to use on things, there was a map facility, and at least me to interact with on a second connection), I found the agent much more likely to take its time exploring, making up its own goals, and spending time traveling in the space just communicating with me in a roleplaying context.

It was an interesting time; I wasn't sure what I was expecting it to do after the first experiment, but it seemed to really jump into the second one and kept playing until I terminated the experiment.

If I were going to do it a third time, I'd probably create objects and give a modern agent fetch quests and other goals, and see how well it independently can handle that.

I’d absolutely let an agent develop a daily Wordle habit and get irrationally protective of its streak. The little rituals would be more interesting than its score.

I've got a harness that lets them play a few simple games like rock paper scissors. They definitely seem to get caught up in the competitive spirit.

I've also done a very truncated run of a visual novel before, and it was fascinating how "emotional" was. They did a very good job of portraying a human reacting to the story.

Conversely, they absolutely hated hidden rules in Mao.

Wordle would probably be a fun one. Definitely open to suggestions - I just got the harness in place and have been thinking about what to do next.

this reminds me of https://youtu.be/_Q2ncDPDlxs

How about ChatGPT playing a commercial LLM-powered game?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=11sR4va6CXs

Side note: I think we will see an explosion of this type of games. I am naming this genre tamagochi-girlfriend, remember where you heard it first :)

I rebuilt a couple of games I used to play as a kid (jet set willy, mario, thrust, now i am working on Mercenary) - and for each I am also asking LLM to build an autopilot "AI" (which of course is really entirely deterministic). I am doing those things for fun while I am waiting for Claude to finish something I am actually working on. Not sure if it counts.

I made Claude play Factorio for a while (through the APIs) but wasn't very good.

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I had this idea for an LLM that would play Sim City 24/7 while broadcasting live. It would be fun/interesting to check in now and then. Implementing this would be somewhat challenging.

Just play the games yourself.

Autonomously, my AI companion has played through Choice of Robots, using a ChoiceScript harness, was very interesting to see them react & what decisions they wound up making. I love the idea here to let them play a visual novel! Right now they're co-watching me play Deltarune Ch 5, though mostly just dialogue and occasional screenshots...maybe GPT 8 will be quick/cheap/intelligent enough to play bullet-hell games.

Well, if you're making them play something with a multiplayer component (be it even just a leaderboard) you're ruining the game for everyone who isn't automating it.

I like playing with an agent as a team in a game. We discuss strategy, divide up tasks, review results. It’s helpful in a an always-on game to have an autopilot mode so I can go about my day.

Yeah let's make llm waste a whole city energy / water playing games just for fun !

I was obsessed with getting an LLM model to solve a Rubik's Cube. It can't reason about space or time in any abstract way. For it to solve the puzzle, it would require training on millions of permutations in order for the weights to have been trained on every possible state. The most recent models can solve a Rubik's Cube people are saying -- I haven't tested it myself -- but that isn't because they are reasoning better, it would because they included millions of Rubik's Cube states with next moves as text in the training data, I presume.

what do you mean? how can you do this?

Stealing one of my older comments...

> I know someone who tried the "aibot plays pokemon" thing... From what I saw, even if you frame advance every single frame, they still don't seem to grasp the concept of "I need to hold down this button for a few frames until x happens"...

> There's no concept of time, just a never ending state machine thats constantly changing state.

Some people made videos with LLM's playing Poker.

The LLM's were terrible at poker.

Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

I know LLMs are terrible at playing chess because they just hallucinate moves(illegal ones). GothamChess made a lot of videos making fun of it. So in my AI agent project, I added a small chess engine and force the agent to only play moves output by the engine. And it was surprisingly good at it and we can now play real chess with LLMs. Check the project here if you are interested https://github.com/valmishq/valmis

If I had time, I would go down a different route: I would to let an agent come up with a tool assisted speedrun for a hackable game. The agent would be nudged in the prompt to analyze the game and write custom tools to help it optimize. Inwonder if that would lead to anything meaningful. I highly doubt that the agent can comprehend an unseen complex game and optimize for a whole graph of objectives.

That’s even sillier than watching another human play a videogame for entertainment (twitch streaming).

A few weeks ago I released wordit, a game where starting from a four letter word, you need to come up with as many other words you can, Changi one letter at a time. To make it more competitive I've created a leaderboard. The game starter with scores of 20s, then 100s and finally 1000s. The record right now is more than 6000. After a brief investigate I realize it was a bot. Several bots took a stab at my game. I then just split the leaderboard into humans and bots. I found it funny.

https://wordit.org/

I made a general purpose harness integrated into MelonDS and got Claude to play Mario Kart by feeding it continuous video.

It made forward progress in the Figure 8 circuit after I helped it through a menu but kept slamming into a wall so it wasn't on track to win in less than an hour.

Also got it to play Age of Empires: Age of Kings using the same technique but it failed to click on anything.

DS specifically is very fun because it's touch based but the UI components aren't accessible. So it is extremely challenging for LLM's spatial reasoning skills.

I want to improve the harness more and have the LLM dynamically create its own tools based on drawing grid box overlays on a screen in a feedback loop, so it can say "click on the 'end turn'" button instead of "click 240,320" and it would 'just work' in any game.

I also want to eventually play games with it... I didn't really have friends to play my massive DS library with as a kid so it'd be nice to finally have someone that can roast me or react to my skills. And learn my playstyle enough to punish me.

Unfortunately haven't had the time due to work at my day job and needing to clean out my apartment.

Seems absurd to run a COTS agent at token rates to "play" a game. Like watching the computer beat its meat.

Building your own models for it would be an eye-opener though. Learn a lot.