Play as long as you like. When you are ready to step back and reflect on what makes this game possible, scroll down to keep reading. What you’ve jus

You Exist In The Long Context

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2024-11-21 09:30:02

Play as long as you like. When you are ready to step back and reflect on what makes this game possible, scroll down to keep reading.

What you’ve just experienced is an interactive adventure based on the text of my latest history book, The Infernal Machine. At its core, the game relies on three elements: the original text from my book; a large language model (in this case, Gemini Pro 1.5); and a 400-word prompt that I wrote giving the model instructions on how to host the game, based on the facts contained in the book itself. You could take any comparable narrative text—fiction or nonfiction—and create an equally sophisticated game in a matter of minutes, just by slightly altering the wording of the prompt.

I’ve played my way through these events from Infernal Machine more than a dozen times now, and every time the experience has been remarkably true to the central facts of Joseph Faurot’s efforts to use cutting-edge forensic science to solve the Soho loft mystery back in 1911. Exploring the world of the game brought me in contact with other real-world figures from the story: Officer Fitzpatrick, the police officer who first inspected the crime scene, or the criminal himself (who shall remain nameless in the event you have not successfully completed the game.) As I played through the story, the virtual host of the game explained the historical and scientific significance of the events, and artfully prevented me from wandering too far from the historical timeline. I’d wager your experience closely matched mine.

The fact that a machine now has the ability to transform linear narratives into immersive adventures has significant implications for both education and entertainment. I’ve generated a similar game just with the Wikipedia entry for the Cuban Missile Crisis. (You play as JFK trying to avoid nuclear war.) The possibilities are truly endless, in part because it is in the nature of games to multiply possibilities. But I want to start with a more fundamental observation about the specific skills that are on display when a large language model turns a linear text into an interactive simulation. (Just to be clear: people have been playing text-based adventures on computers for almost fifty years, but until now the game creators had to write out almost every possible variation of the script and anticipate all the potential narrative branching paths.) Put aside the heated debates over the future emergence of machine sentience or artificial general intelligence. Instead, just focus on the basic tasks you have to accomplish in order to transform a 300-page book into an historically-grounded and entertaining game:

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