The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist. According to their paper on the research, the AI can be played for up to 20 seconds while retaining all the features of the original, such as scores, ammunition levels and map layouts. Players can attack enemies, open doors and interact with the environment as usual.
After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.
An AI-generated recreation of the classic computer game Doom can be played normally despite having no computer code or graphics.
After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.
Why are we lying about this? Just because it happens in the AI “black box” doesn’t mean it’s not producing some kind of code in the background to make this work. They even admit that it “runs out of memory.” Huh, last I checked, you’d need to be running code to use memory. The AI itself is made of code! No computer code or graphics, my ass.
The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist.
Always a good look. /s
I mean, yes, technically you build and run AI models using code. The point is there is no code defining the game logic or graphical rendering. It’s all statistical predictions of what should happen next in a game of doom by a neural network. The entirety of the game itself is learned weights within the model. Nobody coded any part of the actual game. No code was generated to run the game. It’s entirely represented within the model.
What they’ve done is flattened and encoded every aspect of the doom game into the model which lets you play a very limited amount just by traversing the latent space.
In a tiny and linear game like Doom that’s feasible… And a horrendous use of resources.
“No code” programming has been a thing for a while, long before the LLM boom. Of course all the “no code” platforms generate some kind of code based on rules provided by the user, not fundamentally different from an interpreter. This is consistent with that established terminology.
No code programming meant using a GUI to draw flowcharts that then creates running code. This is completely different.
Using a different high level interface to generate code is completely different? The fundamental concept is the same even if the UI is very different.
Imagine you are shown what Doom looks like, are told what the player does, and then you draw the frames of what you think it should look like. While your brain is a computation device, you aren’t explicitly running a program. You are guessing what the drawings should look like based on previous games of Doom that you have watched.
This would be like playing DnD where you see a painting and describe what you would do next as if you were the painting and they an artists painted the next scene for you.
The artists isn’t rolling dice, following the rule book, or any actual game elements they ate just painting based on the last painting and your description of the next.
Its incredibly nove approchl if not obviously a toy problem.
I really hope this doesn’t catch on, Games are already horifically inefficient, imagine if we started making them like this and a 4090 becomes the minnimum system requirement for goddamn DOOM.
Games are already horifically inefficient
That’s so far from the truth, it hurts me to read it. Games are one of the most optimised programs you can run on your computer. Just think about it, it’s a application rendering an entire imaginary world every dozen milliseconds. Compare it to anything else you run, like say slack or teams, which makes your CPU sweat just to notify you about a new message.
Many games, especially AAA games or ones relying on common game engines, are actually horribly inefficient. It’s hard to run any Unity/Unreal game in 4k on my 1070. Even if it has shit graphics like Lethal Company. What does run well? Smaller, custom engines, even Metro Exodus runs with 60+ FPS in 4k on my 1070, and still looks very good. Why? Because 4A Game is/was actually interested in creating a good engine and games. That’s the whole reason they split from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R team: Because, in their opinion, the engine was too inefficient.
Most games are just a quick cash grab tho, especially ones by large companies like EA. Other large companies with a significantly lower output of games, eg. Valve, do produce programmatically higher quality games tho.
It’s hard to run any Unity/Unreal game in 4k on my 1070
Both of these engines are capable of making very optimized games, it’s just that most of the developers using them either don’t have the expertise or don’t care to put in the effort.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t there have to be a code layer somewhere in there?
It’s like all those “no code” platforms that just obscure away the actual coding via a gui and blocks/elements/whataver.
In this case, no. This is just interpreting what the next frame should be by the previous one. Like how the sora videos work, but with input.
Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.
And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.
Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.
I’m pretty sure that screenshot is from the video. The zombieman has no feet
Possibly fair. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that exact screenshot used in other articles about Doom, but I’m not enough of a Doom nerd to be sure.
There’s a decent writeup over at Pivot-to-AI that looks at the paper as a whole in more detail.
“Playable” nah. “Interactive” yes.
