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sunnyba

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quant researcher - sunny.m.bala at gmail

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thanks for the traffic everyone -- definitely hitting rate limits on gemini already so if it doesn't work please give it a try later in the day or try the example.

Apologies for the inconvenience! If anyone on the gemini team can help out, please lmk (email in bio).

Thanks! Like another user commented below, I think the appeal of the pixel art sprites is that at a lower level of detail it can feel really accurate. 10 different real life red jackets can all end up as the same pixel art representation but each person would recognize it as their jacket! It feels like a form of compression.

On prompting, you can get most of the way there in AI studio on Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental by uploading a picture and asking for "a high quality detailed pixel art sprite of this character." Most of the backend annoyance here was iterating to improve prompt adherence (characters not facing the same way, outfits changing between frames, etc).

Some technical notes. Even for something like this, the OpenAI API can be expensive - there's a few decisions I made that keep costs lower.

1. I cache guesses and responses in Redis when I first see them, so I don't need to hit the API for duplicate guesses (which are common when lots of people are guessing the same movies).

2. Emoji order doesn't matter (I apply a sorting to guesses).

3. Guesses are not path dependent, with each guess being treated as completely new. This is understandably annoying when GPT guesses the same incorrect movie multiple times, but it drastically improves the cache-ability and keeps me from hitting my API limits.

Happy to answer any questions here! If you'd like to reach out to me my email is in my bio.

nice! I don't limit the search space in the system prompt to GPT, though each daily puzzle is using popular movies. I think for the top ~100 movies it'll probably do a fine job.

If this game goes on for a full year though, I imagine it's going to really struggle unless the movie is about something really unique.

Thank you!

I ended up trying to funnel people towards the emoji picker so that I could: 1) prevent unknown emojis outside the training window of GPT 3.5. As an example, ChatGPT said that this one was a box of falafel.

2) exclude certain emojis that had a high likelihood of leading to GPT refusing to guess (it would claim were too generic).

That's right, they're not available.

From testing as I developed this, I noticed that certain emojis often lead to complaints from GPT 3.5 about how the combinations were too generic. After some really basic testing I ended up removing the 3 worst offenders from the emoji picker: ['+1','-1','okay_hand'].