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Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.

I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.

I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon

The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)

Comments

rickintoplace•6h ago

That's actually fun to watch. Did you experiment with nicknaming before you turned it off? I'd be a little curious to see how it behaves.

pancomplex•6h ago

Jev can't come up with original text, but I did consider giving it a list of hilarious names.

JamesSwift•44m ago

Sure it can, just ask it for next char or "done" in a loop

pancomplex•41m ago

True!

pancomplex•24m ago

I just took your advice and added it to the list of Jev decisions. Watch it name its next Pokemon!

IanCal•43m ago

Maybe letter by letter spelling?

testaccount28•1h ago

with such a fat harness, this is more like watching a walk thru play the game.

laszlokorte•33m ago

Yeah I would have expected it to only decide which button to press, not something abstract like the choice of "go east to lavender town" for the goal of "in lavender town, climb the pokemon tower"

lwarfield•59m ago

Looking at the diagram in the gh repo, it looks like this is entirely jev. Are there any examples of people having a big model like Fable handle high level goals?

staindk•46m ago

Hm wondering what a first pass optimal setup might be - jev for overworld navigation, escalate to sonnet for easy battles, opus for medium difficulty battles, and fable for gym bosses could probably have jev also manage all the escalation / de-escalation to different models.

pancomplex•46m ago

Frontier reasoning models do pretty well in Pokemon: https://github.com/benchflow-ai/pokemon-gym

The interesting thing here imo is the cost and latency. So far we're at 4 badges for less than $0.5

SeanAnderson•31m ago

I'm not sure if you're asking about whether using Fable makes playing the game possible or if you're just curious about Jev + LLM interactions.

However, https://x.com/TynanSylvester/status/2096965749369720970 Astra was able to beat RimWorld. So LLMs are definitely able to drive these sorts of games to completion with their current abilities.

delichon•6m ago

A Robot is Sprinting Towards You: Do You Want it Running on Claude or Grok?

https://openrouter.ai/blog/insights/royale-last-agent-standi...

MitPitt•58m ago

This is kinda chill to have in the background. I wish there were livestreams showing live reasoning of top models which are currently trying to solve cancer or whatever. Imagine the pogs in chat when it does.

pancomplex•54m ago

People need to be live streaming their AI more!

tehnoslow•48m ago

Actually, yes, that would be at least interesting

361994752•58m ago

watched it stuck at rocket hideout for 10 mins.... let me check 1hr later to see if it can find a way out

jumploops•44m ago

It’s currently stuck at an elevator and deciding to teach Pokemon various TMs and HMs instead of progressing… pretty hilarious!

pancomplex•24m ago

it made it through!

stusmall•50m ago

>but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly

Did I miss something? I thought one of the demo videos was it doing pretty decent at the first level of Doom?

pancomplex•45m ago

In my experience it was too slow to do an FPS with 30 ticks per second reliably. It gets killed too fast.

theturtletalks•48m ago

Is Frigade going to use Jev to do object detection?

pancomplex•45m ago

Working on it :)

theturtletalks•41m ago

Nice. When I saw your connection to Frigade, I knew there was a connection haha

dmitrygr•46m ago

Considering it just made Charizard forget its only fire-type move "Ember" to learn "Counter", I note no signs of intelligence.

pancomplex•41m ago

Rookie mistake clearly..

stusmall•41m ago

This is so interesting to watch. For a couple minutes I was in awe of how quick and cheap it was. Then I saw just how bad the decision are and how it would get stuck in strange loops of going in and out of the same door to no end.

This seems like a technology heading in the right direction but not quiet there yet. Excited for what they are cooking up but probably won't start building around it yet.

pancomplex•29m ago

Like others have mentioned in this post, I think a mix of models like Jev for simple stuff + a smarter reasoning model for more strategic thinking is the optimal solution. This experiment however is purely Jev. Which sometimes can be kinda dumb.

binlog•27m ago

This entire conversation around Jev seems weird to me. Like... we started from neural nets that could do basic decision making and classifications pretty well, then trained larger and larger language models to get to where we are now. Now suddenly everyone is going crazy because someone trained a smaller model that is adequate at making decisions? We already went through the "look this AI can play pokemon terribly" phase like a decade ago.

azan_•15m ago

Making decisions quickly, cheaply and without having to train your own model.

joshuat•12m ago

Math.random can make poor decisions quickly and cheaply

djhworld•21m ago

What's not clear to me on the video is whether jev is doing the button presses for controlling the character to move around.

The "Jev calls" counter only seems to increment at junction points like battles, conversation prompts, menus etc.

Is something else moving the character around?

pancomplex•18m ago

It's connected to the ROM of the actual game, so it can see a lot of things. It has multiple tools available, including being able to move to coordinates.

All in the OSS repo if you wanna play around with it: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon

avaer•16m ago

I wish jev took in images so we could do this generically for any game, without memhacks. I'm sure that's coming.

You could front this with an image -> text model but that would be much lower quality vs latency, and the whole point of doing it with a decision model is remove the latency.

Games are a really interesting testing ground for robotics; if we can solve game playing (incl 3d) we could embody "system one" intelligence into robots that have something emulating general reflexes without needing to fine tune.