Comment by bbor

Fascinating look into how culture impacts research. This is done in China, and seemingly takes a 100% empirical mindset, deciding not to mention any of the theoretical frameworks that could back such a system, the most obvious of them being Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind (highly recommend, the most hacker-style book on theoretical AI out there). If I had to guess, that’s 50% due to language barriers and 50% due to overall intellectual orientation.

Regardless, their results are very interesting! Dedicated doomers may remember that Stanford did a proof of concept for this almost exactly a year ago, but it was focused on “believability” of the society rather than the society’s collective ability to perform tasks: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/computational-agents-exhibit-b...

On a humorous side note: I was curious about their choice of a fun name for their simulated environment — “IrollanValley” - in an otherwise very empirical and dry paper, and was excited to learn something about Chinese folklore! But, uhh no lol, it’s just a reference to the video game Heroes of Might and Magic https://mightandmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Irollan

Thanks for posting! I’ve gotta hurry up and publish before this gets out of hand. In addition to the need for a Society of Mind discussion in any follow up paper, I personally hope to see a discussion of Terminator’s SkyNet, as well…