manas96

I agree, low-level highly specialized technology roles within game companies do pay well.

Interesting. Any (in)famous UMA vote debates? Or interesting Unknown/50-50 outcome resolutions?

Just curious but how are bets arbritated on these website?

Meaning who decides if an outcome was yes or no? Answers to things like "Who will win the next Best Picture Oscar?" are fairly obvious and binary.

Can we make bets whose answers are not binary yes/no?

What about "Will celebraty X and Y break up?"? Does Polymarket go to X and Y to confirm if they broke up or something :D

Thanks, I'll try using the "Following" tab. I have a lurker account but never really used it because I only ever saw crap in "For You".

I did prompt additional times insisting on realistic physics..

I think modelling accurate articulated body dynamics is feasible but when you add deformation (muscles) it gets much harder.

Indeed, it entirely depends on which axis you want to focus on. A loose trade-off chart would be speed, stability and accuracy. You can only have two of these in a simulator.

Robotics folks probably want speed and accuracy. I'm from the video game industry so I generally look for speed and stability.

Note: This is a loose analogy and recent techniques are already blurring the lines between these axis.

Thanks for the additional reading. I've often thought about LLMs and their ability to represent the physical world with its laws. And always concluded it is not really possible to do so with "just" text tokens and their relations in a latent space. It looks to me there are different approaches being taken to tackle this:

* You could instruct your LLM to interact with a simulator to run experiments and infer behaviour

* You could edit the transformer model and inject spatially relevant data rather than text as is done in above paper

* You could change the architecture to be more condusive for representating a world state. I.e., LeCun's JEPA world model.

* You could further enhance some of the above by using a differentiable physics engine (eg. NVIDIA Newton) to calculate losses directly.

But at the end of the day if a model has any hope to always produce realistic physics, it HAS to learn the laws of nature in some form or other. It looks to me that the next big leap could be achieved by combining the last two approaches.

P.S.: I like discussing such topics. If anyone knows a forum or discord with like-minded people, please let me know :)

it was the first link I got after googling free video hosting sites

In my day job I program rigid body behaviour in real time amongst other simulations. I think rigid body contact is hard to learn as it is inherently discontinuous.. something you discover when trying to code a solver.

As such I always use this prompt as a test: "A video of a jenga brick tower falling over as a brick is removed. The physics of each brick must be realistic."

It gave me a video of where bricks suddenly disapper or morph into others[1]. The linked video is after 2-3 iterations of me insisting on realistic physics. If you are just glancing at this, you would believe it is realistic.

That said this is still very impressive and one more step towards .. IDK what. But I am a bit reasurred that at least my job won't be fully replaced with AI :)

[1] https://streamable.com/2em1r3

so in essence is it trading memory for speed?

200% agree. If you decide to use this power you must accept the tiny risk and huge consequences of it going wrong. The article seems like it was written by AI, and quoting the agent's "confession" as some sort of gotcha just demonstrates the author does not really understand how it works...

LLMs are not deterministic per my understanding. A program always produces the same output for the same input and instructions (ignore FP accuracy for now). How is determinism achieved here?

I think the diagrams look very similar to what Keenan Crane uses in his papers, perhaps they used that tool. I think his students have now fleshed it out for general use.

One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least).

As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.

I've always observed a curious thing within India regarding the Devnagari (Hindi) and Latin (English) scripts. Essentially all English words are always written in Devnagari, but it's rarely the other way around. For example it is much more likely to see इंग्लिश टू हिंदी than "angrezi se hindi".

My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

Thank you for asking and forwarding the answer. I appreciate your comments.

Speculation as well: Looking at the trailer for Bitcraft, it looks like they have articulated characters and cloth physics. This raises more questions for me.

That's great, especially the deterministic part. Did you run into determinism problems with two different CPU architectures for server and client?

I see, that's extremely interesting. As mentioned earlier, I do respect efforts to push on something new, especially if it's against conventional wisdom and would be interested in poking around with an open mind. I'll join the Discord. Thank you!

Then again looking at the FAQ for Bitcraft, we have this:

"What engine does BitCraft use? The BitCraft client is developed using the Unity game engine. For the server, we have developed a sophisticated distributed system called SpacetimeDB, which hosts the entirety of BitCraft’s server architecture. "

Correct me if wrong, but this suggests the physics engine is Unity's, and not something implemented in SpacetimeDB.

Nice, that's very interesting and a commendable achievement!

If that is the case I would really like to see some internals of how the physics engine has been implemented in their pattern. I'm not asking for the rapier port source code, but it is hard to think in terms of a new advertised programming paradgim when there's no working examples.

For example I am very curious to see how a constraint solve is implemented in a SQL-like fashion. You would need various math operations and an efficient matrix representation off the top of my head, and I can't think of how that maps to a SQL-like interface.

Given the name I was also expecting some clever SQL-like data structure/query for fast spatial lookup but I digress.

Game physics involves a lot of things (solvers, collision detection, numerical stability, etc.). I am skeptical of their claims of being able to run physics in what I understand are stored procedures for their database.

I looked at their docs for physics https://spacetimedb.com/docs/unity/part-4 where they demonstrate the simplest form of collision check (sphere overlap). I fail to see how that is an improvement or speedup over existing methods. Some quotes: "This may not be the most efficient way to do collision checking (building a quad tree or doing spatial hashing might be better), but SpacetimeDB is very fast so for this number of entities it'll be a breeze for SpacetimeDB." >> Nothing is quantified with numbers.

"For every circle, we look at all other entities." >> This is the most inefficient N^2 way you could do collision detection.

And not to mention networked physics is a whole additional layer of complexity, where you have to use some form of prediction techniques and very likely end up changing your core physics code to accommodate this.

All of this suggests to me much thought has not been put into the claim "you can also do physics with it!" and its implications. Perhaps it is enough for extremely simple physics, as demonstrated with their demo game. If the author is reading this, I suggest spending some time understanding what this claim implies and qualifying it better.

However I must mention that I applaud their courage to try something so outlandish. If you truly believe your claims are possible, I encourage you to keep working on it.

But I'll be convinced when extraordinary evidence backs extraordinary claims.

Source: I work on a commercial game physics engine and related netcode.

Wohoo, my name is in the contributors list! This helped me get in a computer graphics grad course at a top(?) school and certainly helped in further job applications.

If anyone else is interested in a graduate degree in this field, I recommend doing something similar - I simply made a few reasonable PRs to fix some issues that I found when following along the books.

I just started, but my hope is to post about nature, photography and computer graphics. I've only got time to finish one full article so far. It's a low-budget guide to the Montreal GP with some sweet photos I'm proud of: https://manas96.github.io/blog/f1guide/