Kaj_Sotala comments on LINK: Videogame with a very detailed simulated universe - Less Wrong
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At least there was an interesting part reminiscent of Eliezer's Universal Fire:
Eliezer:
From the article:
I think most proceduraly generated games aren't that deeply interconnected with regard to their laws of physics.
It's also not clear to me if this is the result of good coding or bad coding. (If you've seen people play around with ROM memory tricks, that's what I have in mind; changing a bit that's used in multiple places for multiple things is different from "we adjusted Planck's constant and now the periodic table looks different because the energy levels come out differently.")
This is a press release though, lots of games were advertised with similar claims that don't live up to expectation when you actually play them.
The reason is that designing an universe with simple and elegant physical laws sounds cool on paper but it is very hard to do if you want to set an actually playable game in it, since most combinations of laws, parameters and initial conditions yield uninteresting "pathological" states. In fact this also applies to the laws of physics of our universe, and it is the reason why some people use the "fine tuning" argument to argue for creationism or multiple universes.
I'm not an expert game programmer, but if I understand correctly, in practice these things use lots of heuristics and hacks to make them work.
Another issue is too simple optimums. Human players are great at minmaxing game rules (=physics) and if the optimal behaviour is simple, well, the game's not fun any more.