This AI-powered adventure game rewrites itself in every match
What's the story
From detecting critical diseases to defeating professional poker players, AI is doing wonders in a range of fields. The tech has become more capable than you could ever imagine and is now being leveraged to develop an adventure text game, one that rewrites itself in every new match. Here's all you need to know about it.
Bot
OpenAI's text generating bot leveraged for the game
Back in February, Elon Musk's AI start-up OpenAI claimed to have developed an AI bot, GPT-2, that generated text with human-like accuracy from a given excerpt. The tech worked so well that the company feared it may be used for generating fake news and hoaxes. However, it did release a smaller version of the algorithm, giving AI-tweakers an opportunity to play with it.
Game
Public version of GPT-2 used for generating text adventure game
Now, using the public version of GPT-2, Nathan Whitmore, a student from Northwestern University, developed a text adventure game called GPT Adventure. It uses the predictive neural network framework of the bot and allows the players to explore a world of text that is created instantly after each action of the player. So, nothing is pre-programmed and there's no telling what might happen next.
Quote
Here's what Whitmore said about the game's working
"You can feed in the player's current location and their action - 'go east' - and then you just ask GPT-2 to predict what text comes next, which is the consequence of that action. Then the player makes another action, and you have a game."
Creation
How this game was created?
Whitmore brought the text adventure game to life by training GPT-2 on the transcripts of users who played Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure - classic text adventure games of the 70s. Then, Whitmore added, their algorithms "adjust GPT-2's internal parameters until the text it produces looks like the text from the text adventures. This lets GPT-2 learn the mechanics of text adventure games."
Working
However, it is not fully operational
The training data and working of GPT-2 ensure that GPT Adventure works like an old text adventure game that changes automatically. However, it is worth noting here that the system isn't fully perfect. Whitmore says that it can make errors (like forgetting player's location), which is why they have made some tweaks that ensure common errors are ruled out and the game remains playable.