Gaming, ChatGPT, and Human Use

2 points

3 years ago

I've never spent time playing computer games but I have friends who spend whole days gaming. I spend whole weeks taking online courses so I guess the addiction is the same, just the topic differs.

As more people are put out of work, more people spend time gaming.

There is a huge opportunity here.

Imagine if game companies could design games to solve problems, like finding all of the finite simple groups. Imagine a game that takes the existing theorems, uses chatGPT to make a conjecture, and then the game is structured to make all known theorems available for solving the conjecture. Two examples might be the Collatz conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture or the Andrews-Curtis conjecture [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrews%E2%80%93Curtis_conjecture

For example, Kevin Buzzard created the "Natural Number Game" for teaching how to use tactics to solve proofs. https://www.ma.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/natural_number_game/

This idea could be adapted to a more general gaming context. If the "gaming company" carefully structured the "game" so that it created conjectures that were "very near" the edge of proven theorems then people, thinking it was a game, could spend time trying to solve the problem.

The gaming company would hire professional mathematicians to make conjectures. A "scoreboard" would list people who proved the conjectures.

The computer science curriculum could include a "gaming track". The idea is that compsci students are taught to create "addictive gaming structures" that focus on problem solving. The students would use chatGPT as an NPC (non-player character) who would create "quests" for gamers. The hard parts are figuring out how to re-cast a problem into an addictive "game" and the engineering required to make chatGPT focus on a particular area (e.g. proving theorems) when choosing the quest.

Solving the problem of getting gamers to do productive work while "playing" would let AI take over the world while keeping everyone happy. Win!

So how do we adapt Buzzard's game to change the world?

[0] Baumslag, Gilbert; Buchberger, Bruno; Daly, Timothy The Andrews-Curtis Conjecture Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software (CAISS), City College of New York, June 2005

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