Chris: The No Man's Sky video game is brilliant.
Most games are built by designers that hand craft characters, maps, and entire worlds. What else could they do?
In No Man's Sky, the designers create a set of algorithms and set them loose. The algorithms create a universe populated with planets and creatures new to everyone, including the designers themselves. This universe is huge, with approximately 18 billion billion planets.
That's an impossibly large amount of data to store, right?
No.
Just about everything in these worlds can be created by a deterministic calculation from an initial seed value and the algorithms. A world isn't "calculated" until someone visits it. And when they leave, the data is thrown away. If they return, it'll be there again, just as they remembered it (with the caveat that time can be an input to these functions, so things can move and change). This universe is made of functions, not data.
Can a small number of functions generate a universe of complexity? Yes -- but more on that in another post.
I'm excited for this game, but also concerned. First, because everything is a deterministic generation from a fixed seed, it's mostly impossible for players to leave their mark on the universe. Yes, they can log findings in a central repository and name discoveries, but "sandbox" games like Minecraft thrive because they enable creation, not just categorization.
Second, from public demos, it looks like the game AI (an entirely different species than deep learning AI) is pretty rudimentary. Since the likelihood of running into another human on one of these 18 billion billion planets seems pretty low, the game needs good AI for a rich experience. But because the AI are on generated worlds, I don't see how they can have complex canned plot lines of interaction with our character. Alliances and fighting? Sure. Cooperation for resource gathering? Sure. But is that enough? Can the AI develop more complex plots themselves? I doubt it.
So the promise of endless world discovery may turn into a very lonely and futile journey. I hope not, because this game is an original, incredible work of art. Either way, Sean Murray is definitely enjoying the adventure.