Quite right. Code hero is fun as a creative challenge, but story and conflict are what drives the player to give them a REASON to make each creative leap. There is a sandbox mode where you can create and eventually share your worlds, but to start the priority is for young people who try it to get hooked enough so we can turn them into coders.
Both Tron and MAtrix are big inspirations but we take the actual literal reality of what exists in a 3D game engine world simulation as the rules of the land rather than making up movie-friendly metaphors with nerdy words. Matrix and Tron and Star Wars are all essentially fantasy sci fi: Lots of fun, but not closely linked to a physical reality. Although Code Hero takes place in a Matrix-like world, it has definite rules which players can master and exploit and one can parlay that mastery into creating your own games and pursuing other computer science inspired paths.
We're working to make the visuals more informative and interactive gameplay-wise than being merely eye-candy. Hence the green walls of code are not japanese gibberish but javascript that can be read and used and manipulated.
If you see a pretty graphical effect, the code glowing in it may in fact be the shader code that generates itself.
Creator here: Copying code is analogous to finding items in a regular RPG FPS. You can bind code to any hotkey on the keyboard till you are bristling with tools for creating and combating anything imaginable. But you can also instantly edit the code mid-combat or while solving puzzles to tweak variables at first and eventually to write your own code to solve problems.
Gamer gamers can enjoy this without knowing exactly how code works, but the story is full of actual training opportunities that teach you from syntax up to actual game development in Unity3D.
Code Hero is about creating the future, and we definitely care about making it fun for players who want to build and accomplish things that really mean something for humanity. First and foremost, Code Hero is designed to spur real accomplishment so the conflicts and challenges in the game are spurring the player to acheive real code mastery and creativity that could set lives in new directions and spur invention and achievement which benefits us all.
Slashdot has been the place I connected with my fellow geeks and hackers since I was a 12 year old newb, and this is our way of spreading the gift of geek in a way that every person can get into.
We're developing on Unity3D, which is free but not open-source. As much of the game code as possible will be open and exposed to the player in-game without breaking the security model and content created in Code Hero will be importable to and exportable from Unity3D. There's a code.license and code.permissions field, so it is possible that player could choose how to license the code they create.
Hi! I tried to post earlier but I probably got tab-sidetracked after hitting Preview.
I founded Primer Labs and created Code Hero.
Thanks for all your excellent feedback!
This is our second time on Slashdot in a month as my talk about autocatalyzing mentor AI was linked here to the article based on the transcript of the video:
http://primerlabs.com/slashdottedaccelor8r
In a nutshell, game AI that teaches kids how to code better game AI that teach kids how to code better game AI until the kids start to pick up the traits of their new additional parental mentors.
The graphics there in the trailer were just prototypes made by us programmers.
The final art design has only begun.
We'll have more to announce soon, but I'm happy to answer questions here or by email at alex@primerlabs.com
If you are a Unity3D-experienced or curious developer interested in contributing, contact careers@primerlabs.com.
It's a very proactively secured eval but when players do crash the game in interesting ways we want to give them achievement points so at least they get something after they restart.
Alex Peake here. Education is indeed a challenge of adequate distribution of resources. The problem is that the best class size is 1 and the best mentors are too few to go around even if we lived in a Trekenomic post-scarcity utopia. The role of Primer games is to give every person the sum of all simulatable mentorship in game form and to inspire players to seek and provide each other as much high-quality mentorship as possible, empowering schools and other learning communities to fill the demand for excellent mentorship in new and better ways rather than leaving sole responsibility on them and complaining when they fail to single-handedly turn our kids into math-craving obedient study hallers when there are cooler and funner games to be played and live to be lived and choices to be had.
Alex Peake here. The challenge of increasing global intelligence is not so much one of boosting the max intelligence of the smartest people as it is a challenge of getting 90% of humans bootstrapped to anywhere near that theoretical hardware peak.
Humanity is like a 7 billion core CPU that is running at around 10% efficiency while a tenth of the cores do all the work. This is a software problem and not the hardware's fault.
Genius-level DNA brains die in mud huts every day.
Taking humans beyond those theoretical limits will indeed involve cognitive aids and many of the things we want to do can be done using augmented reality and neuroprospthetics to externalize our memory and provide cognitive coprocessing assistance, but that's not a set of features we're shipping in Code Hero this quarter. Substrate independent minds are likely the only way past our ultimate cognitive limits. See Carbon Copies and the work of Randal Koene for more on this.
Game AI is indeed smoke and mirrors. But to have good conversations with mentor-quality characters we need to change that. Games only need verisimilitude, and games have indeed taken the emphasis on graphics instead of substantial AI. If you watch the talk, ougrowing graphics envy and directing parallel computing power growth at AI with an architecture that is implicitly parallel not only in its threading but also in the use of multiple teams writing competing AIs that run in a shared environment across many different games is the central crux of the whole article/talk. I get the impression that many people have not read the whole article or watched the talk before sharing their general opinions based on the writeup or skimming.
Primer's first game based on mentor AI is going to enter beta soon. Our first game Code Hero is a game about making games where you shoot code with a javascript code gun that lets you directly code the change you wish to see in a Portal-style FPS. Competing AIs recruit you and teach you computer programming. The game directs players to seek our real opportunities to pursue coding and become a code hero themselves. Players are encouraged to mentor each other in real life. Numerous famous historic programming legends are characters in the game and they impart their most famous inventions and achievements to the player to help overcome numerous programming challenges.
For Diamond Age readers, think of it as Castle Turing with Firebug Minecraft Portal guns.
You can watch the early prototype trailer here and sign up for the upcoming beta release:
http://www.primerlabs.com
That is not what the game actually looks like now, but it gives you a preview of the "copy code and shoot it, then edit it to do something new" gameplay style.
My article covers a lot of ground without going into much detail on each item because it is a talk meant to entertain as well. During a talk with a short timeslot with a live audience one does not have time to go into scholarly detail with footnotes to back up every idea and point. The difference between science fiction storytelling and talks about science fiction-inspired technology startups is that the speaker ultimately backs up their words by shipping the product.
The ideas in the article and talk are based on much more than I had time to go into live about the actual work we’re doing at Primer Labs rather than passive predictions of the way things are going by themselves along current trends. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
I’m going to write a written followup article exploring these ideas in more detail, and I’m happy to answer your specific questions.
I'll just quickly start by addressing some of the main questions people have asked:
Too many buzzwords! The 23 minute talk this was based on was not enough time to give technical explanations of all the concepts, especially at a conference where many of the audience members are in the field of AI and are people whom I collaborate with.
AI is impossible, right?
Strong artificial GENERAL intelligence hasn't been achieved yet, and we may be safer if it never is, but particular kinds of broader AI are being achieved. Primer is designed around mentor AI, not strong AGI, at least not initially. Primer is based on the development of many narrow mentor AIs analogous to memes that interoperate to create a marketplace for steadily improving mentorship games.
Accelerating returns with AI are impossible
Moore's Law is based on 3 things: physically exploitable property (smaller chips = cheaper/faster/cooler), market demand (we always need faster ones), and expectation (Moores Law predicts doubling therefore we have to double to keep up with the Joneses and Intels).
AI needs an exploitable physical property, a vast market and a strong expectation based on a breakout success that can be seen to be accelerating to set the pace and expectations.
Human technological development is a series of different curves from each innovation that sparks the next, and it has closely tracked to population density. The one thing you can say about innovation is that it happens in clusters and the more you get people collaborating and competing the more innovation you get faster.
3dfx used game industry market demand to turn graphics acceleration from an expensive workstation niche into a massive market that more than doubled Moore's Law in performance increase because of graphics' inherent parallelism.
If you watch the talk you'll see why I make that analogy.
Alex Peake here. Teaching players inspiration to learn on their own is the first lesson the Primer and Code Hero must teach or else the game would have to pander so basely to pure skinner box entertainment and the payoffs of learning would be wasted on a player who is only playing "for the cool parts".
And AI needn't understand intrinsically what an idea is to teach it to humans. AI need only have temes sufficient to model their behavior sufficient to teach the memes to humans.
Alex Peake here. Agreed, smart people should impart their smarts to smart kids, and not just by having them biologically. Raise smart kids, and mentor everyone elses. Mentors made the difference in my life, and an hour of your time could change a lifetime for a young person.
Slashdot Mirror
Servers fixed. Sorry for anyone who couldn't get to the site.
Quite right. Code hero is fun as a creative challenge, but story and conflict are what drives the player to give them a REASON to make each creative leap. There is a sandbox mode where you can create and eventually share your worlds, but to start the priority is for young people who try it to get hooked enough so we can turn them into coders.
I loved Enter The Matrix and played it all the way through with a friend. Good example. Matrix had bullet time, Code Hero has codefoo.
Both Tron and MAtrix are big inspirations but we take the actual literal reality of what exists in a 3D game engine world simulation as the rules of the land rather than making up movie-friendly metaphors with nerdy words. Matrix and Tron and Star Wars are all essentially fantasy sci fi: Lots of fun, but not closely linked to a physical reality. Although Code Hero takes place in a Matrix-like world, it has definite rules which players can master and exploit and one can parlay that mastery into creating your own games and pursuing other computer science inspired paths.
We're working to make the visuals more informative and interactive gameplay-wise than being merely eye-candy. Hence the green walls of code are not japanese gibberish but javascript that can be read and used and manipulated.
If you see a pretty graphical effect, the code glowing in it may in fact be the shader code that generates itself.
There are indeed heavy permissions on what you can eval in-game. Circumventing some of those is half the fun.
Creator here: Copying code is analogous to finding items in a regular RPG FPS. You can bind code to any hotkey on the keyboard till you are bristling with tools for creating and combating anything imaginable. But you can also instantly edit the code mid-combat or while solving puzzles to tweak variables at first and eventually to write your own code to solve problems.
Gamer gamers can enjoy this without knowing exactly how code works, but the story is full of actual training opportunities that teach you from syntax up to actual game development in Unity3D.
Noisebridge.net Hackerspace represent :) How many slashdotters haven't been to a hackerspace yet?
http://www.Hackerspaces.org has a list of hackerspaces in your area, check them out.
That art was all done by us programmers in prototyping gameplay. We have artists, they're working on stuff that's not in the trailer yet :)
Code Hero is about creating the future, and we definitely care about making it fun for players who want to build and accomplish things that really mean something for humanity. First and foremost, Code Hero is designed to spur real accomplishment so the conflicts and challenges in the game are spurring the player to acheive real code mastery and creativity that could set lives in new directions and spur invention and achievement which benefits us all.
Slashdot has been the place I connected with my fellow geeks and hackers since I was a 12 year old newb, and this is our way of spreading the gift of geek in a way that every person can get into.
Hahaha, that's one Null pun we hadn't thought of yet.
We're developing on Unity3D, which is free but not open-source. As much of the game code as possible will be open and exposed to the player in-game without breaking the security model and content created in Code Hero will be importable to and exportable from Unity3D. There's a code.license and code.permissions field, so it is possible that player could choose how to license the code they create.
Well it looks like this time we got well and truly slashdotted. Our site is down! It's an honor.
Hi! I tried to post earlier but I probably got tab-sidetracked after hitting Preview.
I founded Primer Labs and created Code Hero.
Thanks for all your excellent feedback!
This is our second time on Slashdot in a month as my talk about autocatalyzing mentor AI was linked here to the article based on the transcript of the video:
http://primerlabs.com/slashdottedaccelor8r
In a nutshell, game AI that teaches kids how to code better game AI that teach kids how to code better game AI until the kids start to pick up the traits of their new additional parental mentors.
The graphics there in the trailer were just prototypes made by us programmers.
The final art design has only begun.
We'll have more to announce soon, but I'm happy to answer questions here or by email at alex@primerlabs.com
If you are a Unity3D-experienced or curious developer interested in contributing, contact careers@primerlabs.com.
We're working on a balance between puzzle exploration and action so both kinds of players will be happy.
It's a very proactively secured eval but when players do crash the game in interesting ways we want to give them achievement points so at least they get something after they restart.
What does Player.score say about his power level - What? It's OVER 9000!!!!!!!
(You guessed one of the easter eggs in the game, it doesn't work but it wins you an achievement for trying anyways )
Alex Peake, Code Hero creater / Primer Labs founder
Why do people criticize things? Because they exist.
Alex Peake here. Education is indeed a challenge of adequate distribution of resources. The problem is that the best class size is 1 and the best mentors are too few to go around even if we lived in a Trekenomic post-scarcity utopia. The role of Primer games is to give every person the sum of all simulatable mentorship in game form and to inspire players to seek and provide each other as much high-quality mentorship as possible, empowering schools and other learning communities to fill the demand for excellent mentorship in new and better ways rather than leaving sole responsibility on them and complaining when they fail to single-handedly turn our kids into math-craving obedient study hallers when there are cooler and funner games to be played and live to be lived and choices to be had.
Alex Peake here. The challenge of increasing global intelligence is not so much one of boosting the max intelligence of the smartest people as it is a challenge of getting 90% of humans bootstrapped to anywhere near that theoretical hardware peak.
Humanity is like a 7 billion core CPU that is running at around 10% efficiency while a tenth of the cores do all the work. This is a software problem and not the hardware's fault.
Genius-level DNA brains die in mud huts every day.
Taking humans beyond those theoretical limits will indeed involve cognitive aids and many of the things we want to do can be done using augmented reality and neuroprospthetics to externalize our memory and provide cognitive coprocessing assistance, but that's not a set of features we're shipping in Code Hero this quarter. Substrate independent minds are likely the only way past our ultimate cognitive limits. See Carbon Copies and the work of Randal Koene for more on this.
Game AI is indeed smoke and mirrors. But to have good conversations with mentor-quality characters we need to change that. Games only need verisimilitude, and games have indeed taken the emphasis on graphics instead of substantial AI. If you watch the talk, ougrowing graphics envy and directing parallel computing power growth at AI with an architecture that is implicitly parallel not only in its threading but also in the use of multiple teams writing competing AIs that run in a shared environment across many different games is the central crux of the whole article/talk. I get the impression that many people have not read the whole article or watched the talk before sharing their general opinions based on the writeup or skimming.
Hi Slashdot! I am the author of the article on ACCELER8OR and cofounder of Primer Labs.
This article is based on a talk I gave at Humanity+ @ Caltech. I recommend watching the video with the article to understand it in context.
You can watch the video with visuals that illustrate the main ideas of the talk here:
The Youtube video of the talk
Primer's first game based on mentor AI is going to enter beta soon. Our first game Code Hero is a game about making games where you shoot code with a javascript code gun that lets you directly code the change you wish to see in a Portal-style FPS. Competing AIs recruit you and teach you computer programming. The game directs players to seek our real opportunities to pursue coding and become a code hero themselves. Players are encouraged to mentor each other in real life. Numerous famous historic programming legends are characters in the game and they impart their most famous inventions and achievements to the player to help overcome numerous programming challenges.
For Diamond Age readers, think of it as Castle Turing with Firebug Minecraft Portal guns.
You can watch the early prototype trailer here and sign up for the upcoming beta release:
http://www.primerlabs.com
That is not what the game actually looks like now, but it gives you a preview of the "copy code and shoot it, then edit it to do something new" gameplay style.
My article covers a lot of ground without going into much detail on each item because it is a talk meant to entertain as well. During a talk with a short timeslot with a live audience one does not have time to go into scholarly detail with footnotes to back up every idea and point. The difference between science fiction storytelling and talks about science fiction-inspired technology startups is that the speaker ultimately backs up their words by shipping the product.
The ideas in the article and talk are based on much more than I had time to go into live about the actual work we’re doing at Primer Labs rather than passive predictions of the way things are going by themselves along current trends. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
I’m going to write a written followup article exploring these ideas in more detail, and I’m happy to answer your specific questions.
I'll just quickly start by addressing some of the main questions people have asked:
Too many buzzwords!
The 23 minute talk this was based on was not enough time to give technical explanations of all the concepts, especially at a conference where many of the audience members are in the field of AI and are people whom I collaborate with.
AI is impossible, right?
Strong artificial GENERAL intelligence hasn't been achieved yet, and we may be safer if it never is, but particular kinds of broader AI are being achieved. Primer is designed around mentor AI, not strong AGI, at least not initially. Primer is based on the development of many narrow mentor AIs analogous to memes that interoperate to create a marketplace for steadily improving mentorship games.
Accelerating returns with AI are impossible
Moore's Law is based on 3 things: physically exploitable property (smaller chips = cheaper/faster/cooler), market demand (we always need faster ones), and expectation (Moores Law predicts doubling therefore we have to double to keep up with the Joneses and Intels).
AI needs an exploitable physical property, a vast market and a strong expectation based on a breakout success that can be seen to be accelerating to set the pace and expectations.
Human technological development is a series of different curves from each innovation that sparks the next, and it has closely tracked to population density. The one thing you can say about innovation is that it happens in clusters and the more you get people collaborating and competing the more innovation you get faster.
Likewise, AI is no
Alex Peake here.
3dfx used game industry market demand to turn graphics acceleration from an expensive workstation niche into a massive market that more than doubled Moore's Law in performance increase because of graphics' inherent parallelism.
If you watch the talk you'll see why I make that analogy.
Alex Peake here. Teaching players inspiration to learn on their own is the first lesson the Primer and Code Hero must teach or else the game would have to pander so basely to pure skinner box entertainment and the payoffs of learning would be wasted on a player who is only playing "for the cool parts".
And AI needn't understand intrinsically what an idea is to teach it to humans. AI need only have temes sufficient to model their behavior sufficient to teach the memes to humans.
Alex Peake here. Agreed, smart people should impart their smarts to smart kids, and not just by having them biologically. Raise smart kids, and mentor everyone elses. Mentors made the difference in my life, and an hour of your time could change a lifetime for a young person.
Alex Peake here. Great points and you're on to what we're really up to.
Primer exists to get players outside in the real world mentoring each other to accomplish real missions of their own choosing.
Code Hero will start this process by getting players to learn computer programming and teach each other to advance in the game.