Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jensson 1204 days ago
Much more advanced versions of it exists, and has existed for a long time, for example Kakuro is before computer games. Magic sum is just a special case of it. Finding a discussion with those exact rules are probably a bit hard, search engines aren't good at searching for that, but given how common these games are and how many game design discussions and ideas there are online, a game where "block out these numbers to make these sums" is surely to exist somewhere. The poster above even found the exact same game, although that wasn't described in text, but someone probably described it in text somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakuro

1 comments

Once again, to show that’s one thing is blatantly copying another thing, you kind of have to show that thing exists already. Kakuro is also a similar game with its own unique rules that only somewhat overlap with this one.

It’s not enough to say “a lot of games with similar rules exist” and if anything, that just shows that a generative AI is good at what it does: break down the rules of a game and make modifications to make what is potentially a new game.

If you can show an example of this exact game having existed for centuries, then you have a point. But showing that magic squares and similar games exist… just shows that magic squares and similar games exist, not that the algorithm incorrectly said this is a new game.

The discussion was probability of ChatGPT having invented it, the probability that description for such a game is in ChatGPT's dataset is extremely high. We have examples of that exact game existing (the top post of this thread), and we know from my links that there are countless texts about puzzles like this out there, although they aren't exactly the same.

> It’s not enough to say “a lot of games with similar rules exist” and if anything, that just shows that a generative AI is good at what it does: break down the rules of a game and make modifications to make what is potentially a new game.

No it doesn't, even if that is the case it just shows that it adds random variations. Since we only see the trimmed subset of ideas it generates that people found good enough to post, the smart one is the person.

You would need to prove that ChatGPT actually consistently generates working puzzle ideas that are novel to convince anyone that it actually does so. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so all I need to do is find plausible explanations to how ChatGPT found it, you would need much better evidence to convince people it actually did make a novel game.

> The discussion was probability of ChatGPT having invented it, the probability that description for such a game is in ChatGPT's dataset is extremely high.

If this were the case, it would have been trivial for you to find a game with its written rules described and which match the one generated.

You have done nothing but say that is the case. You haven’t actually proven that’s the case.

ChatGPT can’t magically infer the rules of the game from screenshots, and you have only shown that similar games exist and have existed for centuries. But that is not the same as saying that this specific game has and that ChatGPT just pulled it out of its dataset.

That is the extraordinary claim that you don’t have evidence for but are acting like it’s right there obviously out in the open for everyone to see.

> If this were the case, it would have been trivial for you to find a game with its written rules described and which match the one generated.

Search engines doesn't work like that. You are basically asking me the equivalent of proving that a photo isn't depicting a ghost. No, I can't prove that, I can however come up with examples showing how the photo could have been created even if it wasn't a ghost.

If you want to prove that ghosts are real you need plenty of photos from lots of angles and situations, or videos, and from many sources to show that it isn't all made up by a single person. The equivalent of that would be if they had made ChatGPT generate 100 different working games for example, that would be much more believable. But a single case of a game that already exists and has countless texts describing similar games? It just looks like random chance that got handpicked or plagiarism.

This isn't a court trial, I am not going to sue ChatGPT for plagiarism here, it is just a discussion whether it is reasonable to believe ChatGPT can generate novel puzzle games.

Edit: But do note that since ChatGPT can find such ideas that are hard to find with a search engine, that makes ChatGPT very useful in a way search engines aren't. So I am not saying it doesn't add value. Just that people seem to say ChatGPT does a lot of thing that it doesn't seem to be able to do.

Edit again:

> That is the extraordinary claim that you don’t have evidence for but are acting like it’s right there obviously out in the open for everyone to see.

Yes, you think it is obvious that ChatGPT is capable of very creative and productive thinking. But most people don't think that, to them that is an extraordinary claim. I'm not here to convince you, I'm here to explain to you why you aren't convincing anyone with what you say. People like you were convinced by articles like this before the discussion even began.

> Search engines doesn't work like that. You are basically asking me the equivalent of proving that a photo isn't depicting a ghost. No, I can't prove that, I can however come up with examples showing how the photo could have been created even if it wasn't a ghost.

The claim was that it pulled the game out of its dataset. If this were the case, I would argue it would absolutely be trivial to find them. It’s not some concept that can’t be described in words or would be hard to quantify. The rules have been provided, and, assuming they were plagiarized from somewhere else, would be listed verbatim or close to it.

If a student plagiarized on their work, whether in written form or in code, it’s been trivially easy to find the exact work that was copied from. It generally takes me a few seconds of searching to find it.

This is the same. If these rules existed in a dataset, then it should be equally easy to pull them up and prove the plagiarism. If all you can find is similar puzzles, you can’t just throw your hands up and say “yep, gottem”. That’s just not how this works.

> The claim was that it pulled the game out of its dataset. If this were the case, I would argue it would absolutely be trivial to find them. It’s not some concept that can’t be described in words or would be hard to quantify. The rules have been provided, and, assuming they were plagiarized from somewhere else, would be listed verbatim or close to it.

ChatGPT uses word vectors, it wont use the same words but variants of the words. You can't search for that. Cases where word vectors only maps to single words with no variations for every word are very rare, so ChatGPT is very good at plagiarising things without reproducing exactly, it just rarely fails at it.

> If a student plagiarized on their work, whether in written form or in code, it’s been trivially easy to find the exact work that was copied from. It generally takes me a few seconds of searching to find it.

No it isn't, they just change the words and rewrites it until it no longer looks the same. ChatGPT is trained to rewrite texts like that to avoid triggering trivial plagiarism detectors. They train it to produce the same text, but with different words, producing exactly the same text is punished.

Being briefly mentioned in the dataset would not really help it, because it doesn't "remember" the entirety of the dataset anyway. It would have to be something described repeatedly in the training inputs for ChatGPT to really remember the rules with this level of precision.