Thanks for the links. The simboxy route/justification does interest me (in terms of the kind of work it would require, and what I naturally like doing), and there would indeed be a lot of shared work in the obvious version (likely more than 50%), but I also worry I’d be indulging myself in shiny-thing chasing if I don’t have some extremely concrete objectives, or otherwise some equivalent of a customer who wants the thing to exist so they can use it.
The good news is that the natural outcome of the business side of things will yield a lot of stuff that could be repurposed for simbox-ish use cases regardless, but do you have any specific features/goals/experiments for the system in mind that you didn’t already include in your previous posts?
Honestly I haven’t thought about it very much. Jacob seems to have thought about it more, you could consider asking him. I’m happy to chat, but expect something more like “group brainstorming” than “I tell you what to do”. Some obvious things, I think:
A smart agent in the sandbox can’t escape (insofar as that’s possible)
A smart agent in the sandbox can’t figure out that it’s in a sandbox (insofar as that’s possible)
Compatibility with ML agents run on GPU clusters (obviously)
I’m very interested in whether the agent will “care” about “people”. Can we put trained actors in the sim? (And tell them not to spill the beans that it’s a sim…) What about NPCs? NPCs are very different from people; what would we be learning? (I can imagine that if we make a nonverbal agent, and it prevents nonverbal NPCs from falling off a cliff, maybe that demonstrates something about my agent design, even if that’s far short of where we want to wind up.)
There’s a question of whether to do something analogous to (A) The baby grows up in the sim. It becomes a nice adult, as far as we can tell. Then we turn it off, and use the same design on a new baby that grows up with a robot body in the real world; (B) The baby grows up in the sim. It becomes a nice adult, as far as we can tell. Then we say “surprise, it’s a sim, here’s a portal to the real world” and hope it’s nice there too; (C) The baby grows up in the sim. It becomes a nice adult, as far as we can tell. Then we turn it off, and use the same design on a new baby that grows up in the sim, but this time we don’t keep it a secret that it’s a sim, and then do the portal thing when it’s older. (D) Something else, I dunno. For (B) in particular, it might be especially important that the sim resembles the real world, so that its beliefs & preferences transfer gracefully. Or maybe not, I dunno. In other cases besides (B), it’s not really obvious to me that 3D physics realism has a value-add over simple 2D things like I presume Encultured is doing. Maybe there is, I just don’t know.
Thanks for the links. The simboxy route/justification does interest me (in terms of the kind of work it would require, and what I naturally like doing), and there would indeed be a lot of shared work in the obvious version (likely more than 50%), but I also worry I’d be indulging myself in shiny-thing chasing if I don’t have some extremely concrete objectives, or otherwise some equivalent of a customer who wants the thing to exist so they can use it.
The good news is that the natural outcome of the business side of things will yield a lot of stuff that could be repurposed for simbox-ish use cases regardless, but do you have any specific features/goals/experiments for the system in mind that you didn’t already include in your previous posts?
Honestly I haven’t thought about it very much. Jacob seems to have thought about it more, you could consider asking him. I’m happy to chat, but expect something more like “group brainstorming” than “I tell you what to do”. Some obvious things, I think:
A smart agent in the sandbox can’t escape (insofar as that’s possible)
A smart agent in the sandbox can’t figure out that it’s in a sandbox (insofar as that’s possible)
Compatibility with ML agents run on GPU clusters (obviously)
I’m very interested in whether the agent will “care” about “people”. Can we put trained actors in the sim? (And tell them not to spill the beans that it’s a sim…) What about NPCs? NPCs are very different from people; what would we be learning? (I can imagine that if we make a nonverbal agent, and it prevents nonverbal NPCs from falling off a cliff, maybe that demonstrates something about my agent design, even if that’s far short of where we want to wind up.)
There’s a question of whether to do something analogous to (A) The baby grows up in the sim. It becomes a nice adult, as far as we can tell. Then we turn it off, and use the same design on a new baby that grows up with a robot body in the real world; (B) The baby grows up in the sim. It becomes a nice adult, as far as we can tell. Then we say “surprise, it’s a sim, here’s a portal to the real world” and hope it’s nice there too; (C) The baby grows up in the sim. It becomes a nice adult, as far as we can tell. Then we turn it off, and use the same design on a new baby that grows up in the sim, but this time we don’t keep it a secret that it’s a sim, and then do the portal thing when it’s older. (D) Something else, I dunno. For (B) in particular, it might be especially important that the sim resembles the real world, so that its beliefs & preferences transfer gracefully. Or maybe not, I dunno. In other cases besides (B), it’s not really obvious to me that 3D physics realism has a value-add over simple 2D things like I presume Encultured is doing. Maybe there is, I just don’t know.