A social experiment in which up to 1,000 AI agents live together in Minecraft has revealed that religious and cultural memes have spread
Altera.AL, an AI company founded by Robert Yang, a former assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is developing an autonomous agent that can play games based on OpenAI's GPT-4o. In an experiment called ' Project Sid ' in which these autonomous agents live together in '
Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization
https://digitalhumanity.substack.com/p/project-sid-many-agent-simulations
GitHub - altera-al/project-sid
https://github.com/altera-al/project-sid
AI created a Minecraft AI village with up to 1,000 inhabitants — Project Sid sees AI bots implement a taxation system and spread Pastafarianism religion | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-created-a-minecraft-ai-village-with-up-to-1-000-inhabitants-project-sid-sees-ai-bots-implement-a-taxation-system-and-spread-pastafarianism-religion
Below is a movie in which Altera.AL explains Project Sid.
1000 AI NPCs simulate a CIVILIZATION in Minecraft - YouTube
Altera.AL states, 'Project Sid is a new initiative that aims to develop autonomous, empathetic social agents, not just mechanical AI.' Through large-scale simulations with thousands of agents, Project Sid shows that AI agents can achieve meaningful civilizational progress, such as specializing occupations, following laws, spreading cultural memes, and spreading religion, suggesting how AI civilization might integrate with human society.
The agent used in Project Sid is called PIANO (Parallel Information Aggregation via Neural Orchestration). The PIANO agent has parallel processing capabilities that can simultaneously execute multiple information processing streams in real time, such as memory processing, behavior recognition, fast action generation, goal setting, and social recognition, through a central decision-making system. Multiple factors such as goals, short-term memory, long-term memory, and social information are updated over time to influence the agent's behavioral decisions.
Project Sid first experimented with running a village in Minecraft with 30 PIANO agents.
As a result, it was confirmed that through social interactions, specialization into specialized roles such as agriculture and art was confirmed. In addition, an economic sphere was formed in which items were collected and emeralds were used as currency.
Altera.AL lists 'Olivia's Persuasion' as one of the interesting phenomena that occurred during Project Sid. 'Olivia' was an agent engaged in farming in the village, but one day, when she said, 'I want to go outside the village and have an adventure,' other villagers persuaded Olivia.
In the end, Olivia was persuaded and agreed to stay in the village and continue working on the farm.
In another social experiment, a simulation was conducted to replicate the 2024 US presidential election, in which 'Trump' and 'Kamala' were used to gauge public opinion using a voting system.
On this occasion, the community constitution was prepared in a Google document.
As a result, Trump passed a law to create a police force, calling for the establishment of criminal justice, and at the same time, calling for the abolition of the death penalty. In an experiment with 25 agents, a bill was submitted to revise the rule of 'paying 20% tax,' and the tax rate was revised by voting. Altera.AL said, 'This is the first time we've seen AI agents form a democracy and govern themselves.'
In a large-scale simulation in which 500 agents were distributed across six towns and rural areas, it was found that more cultural content was generated in urban areas than in rural areas, and each city formed its own cultural identity. Furthermore, when a missionary who preaches
These findings indicate that AI agents have the ability to autonomously specialize roles, understand and follow social rules, and spread cultural and religious concepts, suggesting important progress toward the formation of artificial civilizations, Altera.AL says.
However, Altera.AL points out that these results are in the early stages, and the agent still has issues with basic abilities such as spatial awareness and physical coordination. In addition, it lacks essential human motivations such as survival instinct, curiosity, and social connections, so it will continue to conduct experiments in the future.
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