Black holes, buildings on poles, and a 'sea urchin planet': PUBG creator's world-sized tech demo may be hiding some bizarre machine learning 'hallucinations'
I've just set foot for the first time on PUBG creator Brendan Greene's new planet, and I've gotta say: it definitely looks like a planet. I see some rocks. I see a few trees. One day I walked around in a forest, the next, a desert. I see gentle hills and scattered boulders and a sun in the sky, but nothing out of the ordinary. At least not yet.
This is Preface: Undiscovered World, a tech demo from PlayerUnknown Productions, that uses Melba, Greene's new game engine, to create an «Earth-scale world» using «machine learning agents.» Preface is the first step in what Greene estimates could be a «five or 10 year journey» to create a massively multiplayer sandbox the size of a planet (and perhaps the metaverse, maybe).
While all these rocks and trees and hills appear to be perfectly sensible and normal, this planet-sized planet I'm trudging around on may be hiding a few anomalies, at least according to the team building the game engine that generated this world.
«We found that a lot of planet Earth is kind of dull, it's very flat,» senior engine developer Leon Lubking told me when I visited PlayerUnknown Productions last year. «We could, for example, train [Preface] only on New Zealand, and then you would get much more extreme landscapes, or the Himalayas, or some some islands and tropical places, and then you get different results.»
Training the engine on a specific part of the world doesn't mean there won't be some surprises, however, as machine learning (ML) occasionally will, as the Preface team calls it, have a «hallucination.»
«We're using ML agents, which will generate things that you don't always know what it's going to be. Lubking said. „It's just gonna do stuff, and we don't really know. So in essence, we don't know what's gonna happen when people play it. And we don't know what to expect ourselves.“
That means while the team has discovered a few anomalies on their own while testing it, there may be more hidden on the planet that they haven't seen yet. „The ML
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