Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red
Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon. I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun. I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
rickintoplace
That's actually fun to watch. Did you experiment with nicknaming before you turned it off? I'd be a little curious to see how it behaves.
testaccount28
with such a fat harness, this is more like watching a walk thru play the game.
lwarfield
Looking at the diagram in the gh repo, it looks like this is entirely jev. Are there any examples of people having a big model like Fable handle high level goals?
MitPitt
This is kinda chill to have in the background. I wish there were livestreams showing live reasoning of top models which are currently trying to solve cancer or whatever. Imagine the pogs in chat when it does.
361994752
watched it stuck at rocket hideout for 10 mins.... let me check 1hr later to see if it can find a way out
stusmall
>but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly Did I miss something? I thought one of the demo videos was it doing pretty decent at the first level of Doom?
theturtletalks
Is Frigade going to use Jev to do object detection?
dmitrygr
Considering it just made Charizard forget its only fire-type move "Ember" to learn "Counter", I note no signs of intelligence.
stusmall
This is so interesting to watch. For a couple minutes I was in awe of how quick and cheap it was. Then I saw just how bad the decision are and how it would get stuck in strange loops of going in and out of the same door to no end. This seems like a technology heading in the right direction but not quiet there yet. Excited for what they are cooking up but probably won't start building around it yet.
djhworld
What's not clear to me on the video is whether jev is doing the button presses for controlling the character to move around. The "Jev calls" counter only seems to increment at junction points like battles, conversation prompts, menus etc. Is something else moving the character around?
avaer
I wish jev took in images so we could do this generically for any game, without memhacks. I'm sure that's coming. You could front this with an image -> text model but that would be much lower quality vs latency, and the whole point of doing it with a decision model is remove the latency. Games are a really interesting testing ground for robotics; if we can solve game playing (incl 3d) we could embody "system one" intelligence into robots that have something emulating general reflexes without needing to fine tune.
zaik
Seems like it got stuck on a Ghost enemy.
hummusFiend
Great work! Super cool to see it do the whole game. I spent my fable budget building something similar this week but only drove it to Brock. I like the "current focus" framing too.
ac2u
Cool project, comes with a little too much guidance in the harness though IMO (pathfinding, textual milestones etc). (The author is very upfront about this in their README though) I think if it was combined with a regular vLLM it could be really interesting, especially watching the reasoning logs. Bonus points if it was one of the latest open models that somehow had all prior training knowledge of Pokemon abliterated so it was reasoning as an intelligent persona that had no knowledge of even the concept of Pokemon.
dang
Dare we have two Pokemon-playing-AI threads at the same time? Teaching a World Model to Play Pokemon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849907
flockonus
The decisions are quick, but look good as random w/ tons of back and forth. Are you at least feeding back some of its previous decisions on to state?
ViscountPenguin
The choices Jev has here feel very railroady, it seems like something very significantly dumber could beat the game with these options.
dochaus
He confirms what I long suspected, all you need is to cheese Charizard and flamethrower
rubicon33
Pretty awesome! Just curious are you vibe coding this?
sync1117
i need to come up with something more creative and interesting than video games as benchmarks