If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

fxtentacle

“ and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.”

jorl17

You had me at the NAND gate in AoE II's editor.

glenstein

I see a lot of this on Substack these days. LLM enhanced essays in deep language about functional equivalence between mental states as they're known in humans and in human brains, and counterparts that exist in information processing LLMs do. And so the argument on Substact runs down the list of brain events, the list of seemingly analogous processing events, and declares equivalence. Something about it seems to abuse the power of analogies to draw connections, treating view from 10,000 feet comparisons like they're proof of identity. So I do think a paper like this is perfect for the moment and just in time (if not a little late) because it responds to arguments of a form that are currently rampant all over Substack.

warumdarum

Llms are like the grand canyon.. It could totally immagine user reesponses too, the avg user is not even in the canyon unless you stop responding hit a break on character switch. The river of tokens flows with you in it or without you in it. The system of possible routes may be vast, but it can not carve new things from the statistic bedrock, it just wildly flickers between adjacent river arms.

klipt

AoE may be Turing complete but see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

objclxt

> note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

barefootford

It’s worth a reminder on this thread that this 20 year-old game just got ported to macOS last week and is available on steam. For those of you interested in playing again but don’t have a gaming PC sitting around.

andai

> we begin by implementing and training a neural network in Age of Empires II (AoE II) Although it might seem like a fun exercise, wholly unrelated to the topic of anthropomorphism in LLM research, we note that this immediately implies that (1) any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM Why does it imply that? That doesn't sound right to me. Unless we define "sufficiently powerful" as by definition producing that outcome, which seems unhelpful. e.g. there have been experiments training transformers on things other than language, and it's not clear that this produces LLM-like qualities (nor does it seem likely to me). --- Edit: I have misunderstood. The point was that LLMs can be run on any hardware (or in this case, emulator) that can do the actual computations. So the author picked AoE because it's an obviously silly example that goes against the tendency to anthropomorphize. So basically it's the "substance/structure" question. (GPT-5 running on human neurons. Conscious or nah? Human neurons simulated on NVidia. Conscious or nah?) But by the same argument, if you simulate a human brain in AoE, then what? ( Or for that matter, the universe containing all human brains: https://xkcd.com/505/ ) If we find out the universe is being run on a computer made out of legos, does that suddenly make all of us not sentient for some reason?

zuzululu

good article I do think that its natural for humans to anthromorphize especially something that can do a convincing job butt the leap to AOE2 is a bit stretching things. If you hear your dog say 'wololo' is he AOE2 ?

kybernetikos

I'm not sure who this kind of thing is aimed at. I think the majority of people who are happy to anthropomorphise LLMs from a philosophical point of view (rather than those who just do it for convenience, the same way you might a cat or dog or stupid thermostat that never works right), are already completely happy with the notion that a computer game might have elements that are human like. They've already accepted that key aspects of being a human are substrate independent, so why would the idea of a computer game as substrate be disconcerting to them? There's no bullet left to bite here.

captainbland

This kind of work continues to make me think that ultimately we're not going to do anything better than just declaring "being a human" is the thing we end up needing to care about, and that searching for abstract properties which explains us better than the sum of our parts is going to be an ultimately fruitless endeavour.

scotty79

Jumping spider with just a handful of neurons has many human-like attributes. Size matters.

Animats

Because Age of Empires II can do a NAND gate? Oh, please. I thought this was going to be about NPCs in video games. NPCs, by intent, have human-like attributes. It's not hard to do. I've done a bit of that, pre-LLM. It doesn't even require anything near intelligence. Some NPCs are better than that. Unreal has demoed some that, if asked about it, can be made to understand that they are NPCs in a game world, and will talk reasonably about it.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCWf2VGdfc

IshKebab

This appears to be philosophical pseudo-nonsense. Not worth reading, sorry.

cyanydeez

isnt this essentially the tiktok tick effect: people who arw continually exposed to a certain cultural aphorism will start to align their behavior to the LLM and generate the psychosis of the LLM. humans are just to susceptible Age of empires cannot do this. hence, what matters is the reversibility of the semblence, not the semblence. LLMs do not do this readily, even if you can instruct them to, say, talk like a vampire, they wont just follow along. humNs winn.

i5heu

So, if I understand this correctly, this paper proves that LLMs can run on crude VMs?

doener

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48429681

azan_

Either human-like attributes can be described using physics or they are magic. If they can be described using physics then they can be simulated. If they can be simulated then they can be simulated in any Turing complete system, include AoE II.

currymj

this paper makes a lot of modest, carefully hedged, and reasonable claims. in its tone however it's written as if it's a brutal takedown of... somebody's perspective. It's hard to tell whose or what perspective exactly. Maybe I'm just misreading the writing style. (Personally, I think the general case here is one of the better objections to computationalism about consciousness. You can make it even more absurd. There exists some isomorphism between the velocities of the molecules in a glass of water, and the states of a Turing machine simulating a human mind. So is the glass of water conscious? Actually there are many such isomorphisms to many possible conscious minds, so is every glass of water simultaneously having every possible conscious experience?)