"“If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II,” is the title of Adrian de Wynter’s paper showing his work. He told 404 Media that absurdity can be a powerful tool. “I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point,” he said. “I should also note that absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science.”
And so De Wynter built an LLM within AoEII using goats. “The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong,” he told 404 Media. “It's not an easy task, given that ‘human-like attributes’ is a bit of an abstract term.”
AoEII has a scenario editor, a sandbox mode that allows players to craft their own maps and quests using the game’s assets, and De Wynter used that to build an operational NOT AND (NAND) gate and a 1-bit perceptron within the game. In this crude version of an LLM, grass is 0, bridges are 1, and goats are the bits. “Only one rail is active at a time, with a goat acting as the signal carrier. When the gate fires, the bit-goats are removed (they ded) and a new bit-goat is placed in its respective output rail,” Wynter explained on his GitHub.
A perceptron is the simplest form of a neural network, it’s an algorithm that sorts an input into binary classes. YouTube is littered with videos of players doing the same thing with redstone in Minecraft. But no one claims the goats of AoEII are neurons in a thinking machine or that the complicated tracks of NAND gates players build in Minecraft show emergent intelligence."
https://www.404media.co/if-ai-is-sentient-then-so-is-age-of-empires-ii/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #NeuralNetworks #VideoGames #AgeOfEmpires #Perceptron
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Endlich: «Age of Empires II» läuft jetzt auf dem Mac
Im Oktober 2024 wurde «Age of Empires: Mobile» veröffentlicht. Dieses Spiel hat nichts mit dem Age of Empires zu tun, welches ich aus der Jugend kenne. Seit Dezember 2025 spiele ich fleissig «Age of Empires: Definitive Edition» auf dem Mac. Das Spiel läuft dabei nicht l
Artikel lesen: https://www.iphone-blog.ch/2026/06/15/endlich-age-of-empires-ii-laeuft-jetzt-auf-dem-mac/
Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition adds a Controller UI on PC https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/06/age-of-empires-iv-anniversary-edition-adds-a-controller-ui-on-pc/
If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.
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