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“ and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.”

You had me at the NAND gate in AoE II's editor.

I see a lot of this on Substack these days. LLM enhanced essays in deep language about functional equivalence between mental states as they're known in humans and in human brains, and counterparts that exist in information processing LLMs do. And so the argument on Substact runs down the list of brain events, the list of seemingly analogous processing events, and declares equivalence.

Something about it seems to abuse the power of analogies to draw connections, treating view from 10,000 feet comparisons like they're proof of identity. So I do think a paper like this is perfect for the moment and just in time (if not a little late) because it responds to arguments of a form that are currently rampant all over Substack.

What shocks me most about LLMs is that they, trained on human-generated content, are trained to be artificial people... that perhaps are no more inclined to operate on primal axioms, self-evident truths, logic, natural law, ontological certainties, etc, than real people.

Llms are like the grand canyon.. It could totally immagine user reesponses too, the avg user is not even in the canyon unless you stop responding hit a break on character switch. The river of tokens flows with you in it or without you in it. The system of possible routes may be vast, but it can not carve new things from the statistic bedrock, it just wildly flickers between adjacent river arms.

AoE may be Turing complete but see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

> note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes.

See also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

It’s worth a reminder on this thread that this 20 year-old game just got ported to macOS last week and is available on steam. For those of you interested in playing again but don’t have a gaming PC sitting around.

> we begin by implementing and training a neural network in Age of Empires II (AoE II) Although it might seem like a fun exercise, wholly unrelated to the topic of anthropomorphism in LLM research, we note that this immediately implies that (1) any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM

Why does it imply that? That doesn't sound right to me. Unless we define "sufficiently powerful" as by definition producing that outcome, which seems unhelpful.

e.g. there have been experiments training transformers on things other than language, and it's not clear that this produces LLM-like qualities (nor does it seem likely to me).

---

Edit: I have misunderstood. The point was that LLMs can be run on any hardware (or in this case, emulator) that can do the actual computations. So the author picked AoE because it's an obviously silly example that goes against the tendency to anthropomorphize.

So basically it's the "substance/structure" question. (GPT-5 running on human neurons. Conscious or nah? Human neurons simulated on NVidia. Conscious or nah?)

But by the same argument, if you simulate a human brain in AoE, then what?

( Or for that matter, the universe containing all human brains: https://xkcd.com/505/ )

If we find out the universe is being run on a computer made out of legos, does that suddenly make all of us not sentient for some reason?

good article I do think that its natural for humans to anthromorphize especially something that can do a convincing job butt the leap to AOE2 is a bit stretching things. If you hear your dog say 'wololo' is he AOE2 ?

I'm not sure who this kind of thing is aimed at. I think the majority of people who are happy to anthropomorphise LLMs from a philosophical point of view (rather than those who just do it for convenience, the same way you might a cat or dog or stupid thermostat that never works right), are already completely happy with the notion that a computer game might have elements that are human like. They've already accepted that key aspects of being a human are substrate independent, so why would the idea of a computer game as substrate be disconcerting to them? There's no bullet left to bite here.

This kind of work continues to make me think that ultimately we're not going to do anything better than just declaring "being a human" is the thing we end up needing to care about, and that searching for abstract properties which explains us better than the sum of our parts is going to be an ultimately fruitless endeavour.

Sadly the article doesn't mention AOE2's actual AI, which along with Magic the Gathering: Arena is built on CLIPS (a s-expr expert system based on the RETE engine), which an acquaintance has gone all in on: https://ryjo.codes/articles/clips-elevator-pitch.html , writing a a course: https://ryjo.codes/tour-of-clips.html and even a declarative chat server: https://ryjo.codes/articles/a-simple-tcp-server-written-in-g... :

    (defrule connection
      (connection ?id)
      =>
      (println "User " ?id " connected")
      (printout ?id "Welcome to the chatroom from CLIPS!" crlf)
      (do-for-all-facts ((?f connection)) (neq ?id (nth$ 1 ?f:implied))
          (printout (nth$ 1 ?f:implied) "User " ?id " connected" crlf)))
    
    (defrule say
      (connection ?id)
      ?f <- (message-buffered ?id)
      ?ff <- (message ?id ~/me ?message)
      =>
      (retract ?f ?ff)
      (printout ?id "You: " ?message crlf)
      (do-for-all-facts ((?f connection)) (neq ?id (nth$ 1 ?f:implied))
        (printout (nth$ 1 ?f:implied)
         ?id ": " ?message crlf)))
    

Here are AOE2's AI docs:

- https://www.scribd.com/document/348253/CPSB

- https://userpatch.aiscripters.net/reference.html

From an example AI: https://gist.github.com/mayerwin/ac4a5ec62f51e94a3fa9:

    (defrule
     (strategic-number sn-resource-control <= 2)
     (dropsite-min-distance stone < 6)
     (building-type-count-total town-center >= tc-level-three)
     (or
      (or
       (players-civ focus-player briton)
       (players-civ focus-player hun)
      )
      (or
       (or
        (players-civ focus-player mongol)
        (players-civ focus-player mayan)
       )
       (and
        (current-age == imperial-age)
        (goal unit-goal skirmisher)
       )
      )
     )
    =>
     (set-goal control-goal my-unique-unit-line)
     (set-goal uu-up-goal 1)
    )

Jumping spider with just a handful of neurons has many human-like attributes. Size matters.

Because Age of Empires II can do a NAND gate? Oh, please.

I thought this was going to be about NPCs in video games. NPCs, by intent, have human-like attributes. It's not hard to do. I've done a bit of that, pre-LLM. It doesn't even require anything near intelligence. Some NPCs are better than that. Unreal has demoed some that, if asked about it, can be made to understand that they are NPCs in a game world, and will talk reasonably about it.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sCWf2VGdfc

This appears to be philosophical pseudo-nonsense. Not worth reading, sorry.