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ravensong • 2 days ago
I've spent a lot of time scrolling through lists of travels made by other users to unscramble and then receive less seeds than I do when I do Stargaze. So I was thinking, what if AI just unscrambled it? I understand that it takes away the challenge but it also decreases my frustration with that stall. Just curious what other users think about using AI to help solve these scrambles...
minnie298a • 2 days ago
@ravensong Personally I feel using AI would feel like I was cheating, and I just don't want to play that way. I also don't really do the TT just because it is time consuming and hard. I could probably get just as many, if not more seeds feeding in the time I spend searching. I also am more inclined to deliberately get wrong answers that are not trinkets, because again, I don't think it's worth my time. I think it is meant to be hard, and it gets slightly harder every year. Also, taking into account all the creature names, how effective would AI be?
ygaria • 2 days ago
Phone using basic player over here....I'm already rather miffed that I cannot do the constellations thing; I spent hours on here grinding and ended up with about a tenth of the seeds I would have got, but even though I take ages doing the scrambly name thingies...and some of them are wrong...and one was misspelt 😭..I still would not use AI.Like botting, it is cheating and this is supposed to feel like a happy event. 🤨
gngdia • 2 days ago
@ravensong I think it takes less time to find the Travel names by ourselves than giving them to AI to unscramble. You would need to send it a list with all the travels because it can't really access the items database and that takes a lot of time, and sometimes the AI can "hallucinate" and who knows with what travel names it will come xD. I personally love spending time deciphering the Travels names, I spend my whole days at the Items Database searching for them 😃 once you enter the "travel name hunting mode" it gets really easy, at least for me.
@minnie298a @gngdia - There lots of "hallucinations" at first when I tried to do it through an AI but it didn't work due to my incomplete list of travels. Then someone created an updated list so now it's only giving an output if the unscrambled response matches 100% with a travel on the given list. In the past, was easier to unscramble if I entered a "travel name hunting mode" as well.@ygaria - I still do constellations on my phone but it is harder. Since I've been doing this event for quite some time now, I've got most of them memorized. I often zoom up on my phone on the section so it's easier to click the dots. While it is not super compatible, it still works on my phone. Now that you've compared AI with botting, it definitely helps me understand that it is cheating. I was just thinking about how AI could be used like the Enigma machine.
@ravensongHonestly think I was too harsh there and so I have changed my mind....it happens.🤫If you're clever enough to set it up, and there's no rule that says you can't use it, then you go for it; why the heck not? This is a game, and AI is also a game (mostly; or so I suspect 🙀) so enjoy!
snowywinter • 2 days ago
I voted last night, and I was going to refrain from commenting as I didn't want to give anyone any ideas,but it DEFINITELY IS cheating. There's the clause in the rules about anything that gives anyone an unfair advantage. And not everyone is going to have access to the same AI tool or even think to use it.(But it got me thinking in the hypotheticals about *If* AI could give an accurate response.- What you plug into any run of the mill thing like you'd find in a search engine... probably not.- Then I was thinking about how someone with enough coding skill, the type I'm supremely jealous of, could train their own model to do it... but I assume that would take far more time than it's worth.- Then I realized... there's an in-between product I've been toying around with that *could* probably handle the task.-- wouldn't use it, as I do believe it's an unfair advantage. Am insanely behind schedule on a real life deadline. Too much effort for something I wouldn't use. I don't think I have the memory capacity to properly test it.-- It would take at least a day of inputting the data, having access to an intelligent enough model to handle the task, writing the instructions for how it's to handle the data, AND it would take having paid access to unlimited memory or running it locally (which I'd rather not subject my computer to) - and with so many travel names and creatures, I KNOW that much data is WAY over the amount where what the memory I have access to can handle (I think it would work on creatures names alone, and with the right instructions, wouldn't even need the list of travels.) I just don't have the funds right now to access the amount of memory what I think this task would require for accurate results. (Well, I could, but that's my CC fund for Cash Shop items here. lol.)If I get time later in the month though I am curious if it would work - I'm super curious now. **I'd test it on a puzzle I already solved myself.**I've gotten really good at coding them to do what I want with precise details and this seems like a fun challenge to test out if it works. Been a few years since I last tried able to get one to play a card game, and they were so bad back then. Some models have become more intuitive since then.Please don't say the name/category of AI tools if you think you know what I'm talking about- I'm being vague on purpose.)
@snowywinter - I have no clue which AI tool(s) you may be referring to but it's so cool you that you can code! I have very little coding skill but was able to get AI to accurately identify a travel I scrambled in less than 30 minutes for free. So...maybe you can figure out too, just for fun?! My school has been talking a lot about AI but I guess I didn't really think about it being inaccessible since everything I do is online through my web browser and everything I do is free.
@ravensong tbf... I was conflating giving instructions with coding. (though I *can* do a minimal tiny basic amount of coding, but I am bad at it >.< really bad.) The tool is already coded, but the prompts you can use are so seemingly infinite that at times it feels like coding. They have been coded to accept different language types, everything from plain speak, to computer syntax. (and the latter is the reason why I conflate it so easily with coding. : P)That's cool that it took you only 30 minutes to achieve accurate results : D *high five*(I mean, half the time that's why scientists and coders do what they do... just to see *if* it can be done. ...and then someone runs off with the results and ruins everything. *explosion emoji.* - but yeah... curious minds to do like to tinker.)Thanks! I hope so too (that I can get around to experimenting. For all my successes, I had a couple experimental projects the past couple weeks that I was expecting great results on that were total flops. Doesn't help when people explain things poorly on how it's supposed to work. "Wait, what do you mean I can't plug that in here?! But that's where it sits in the UI!" -_- Spent Two days working on something to save me time on new builds, only to find out it only works as a temp edit template behind the scenes on existing builds. "Oh, that's what that field is in settings." *unamused emoji.*)Yeah, coming from this from the point of view from an older generation. (most people didn't even have a home computer or even a phone that could access even email by the time I graduated. Only about half of schools and libraries had computers.) Most of the people I know barely know/remember how to use a computer, let alone even know that asking AI a question isn't even accurate. (Granted, I assume most of the older people on here are more computer literate than that, but not necessarily going to come to the conclusion to think of using it beyond when they ask Google a question.)And thinking about the younger kids who are still in school learning.And the people who are at a financial disadvantage (regardless if it's geopolitical or circumstance.)Not everyone is going to be in the sweet spot of always have had computers in their life and got a good education, or have tech savvy friends to keep them up to date on how to use the advancing technology.(I'm curious enough that I've been able to educate myself a bit by asking questions in search and reading tech articles. But I'm so socially closed off I've had no one else to teach me any of this.)Still think it was awesome of you to reach out to the community here to get our opinions on if it's ethical or not to use the automatic assist. ^^(Been interesting to me to see the social shift overall in general society where people are so used to everything being available and accessible it's almost a given that everybody is using it. Where decades ago, even asking a friend for feedback on something before it was finished could be considered lazy and weak. Like we were all expected to do our work entirely by ourselves. : / it could be a rather gray area collaborating. Which I thought was unfortunate. I think collaboration is a beautiful middle ground. Still feels unfair to the socially challenged, but amazing things come out of collaboration sometimes, and as a society we're really built for it, it brings great joy to many. I personally have fantastic memories of working with other writers for crafting unique and creative stories ^^. Far, more memorable than working with AI. Sure, you get great results with both, but it's more about the journey than the destination.Gotta admit, one of my friends is re-working a draft of a book he's been working on, I cringed when he's admitted he'd using AI to assist him. Literally felt like it was taking a shortcut. (and I was a little miffed because it's the type of poetic language I use in some of my writing, and it's also fear/annoyance of here's something that can create it in seconds, and can produce in seconds what i work so hard at and could take me days. - I want when I read a book for it to genuinely feel like it came from that particular author, not sound like everything else out there.) But I give him points for also buying and using a thesaurus.)I know like most of that seems like it got WAY off track from the original question, but it's part of the subtext behind the answer. (one of the hazards of being one of those people that way overthink things. >.<)
@snowywinter - love your input! Thanks so much for sharing.
myriadium • 2 days ago
to be honest, unscrambling something to match with a preset list of items is not rlly something large language models is suited to do. LLMs are essentially the souped up feature of the auto complete next word your phone does where it predicts your next word, except it's trained on billions and billions of stolen text. it struggles parsing through individual letters; if you've seen the screenshots of LLMs struggling to count the amount of r's in the word 'strawberry' (or 'raspberry', since I suspect the popularity of that test has made LLMs more savvy to answer three), you will know that letters are not an LLMs strongest suit.I'm actually surprised you were able to wrangle an LLM to get you an answer, although 'less than 30 min' is still pretty long. I think with some coding knowledge and a complete list of the travels you can quite easily parse the letters and isolate the item on the list that contain the characters in the scrambled phrase. that probably wouldn't even take a min to run. as for the ethics....ehhhhh I generally think any use of LLMs to be useless since I have the hubris of someone who thinks they can do it better. I had briefly considered sharing a program for everyone to use for the ToT event since it's definitely the worst stall with the worst effort to reward ratio, but I suspect that would have been a huge no from the mods. I wish the rules were better defined with this, especially since ai is so pervasive now (altho to be fair, most things on this site don't need LLMs to function).
@myriadium - it took less than 30 minutes for me to gather a complete list of travels and write the instructions for the AI program (LLM) to run with 100% accuracy. The reason it took longer is because I started with an incomplete list which led to a total flop (as well as poorly written instruction/code). Running the actual code to unscramble takes less than 5 seconds. I too would share my resource (which is free and accessible to anyone with a web browser) so that it would be accessible to everyone but I don't think mods would approve of it.
@myriadiumYou definitely gave me a lot to think about for sure. thinking about my frustration how some LLMs can see so dumb compared to the first one I started out on....and then there's ones that are trained with specific tasks and they're doing things like decoding ancient scrolls. (but even if it's taking them a long time to do it months, weeks, to get even a single word, they're still capable of doing it better than humans have, trying for over 100 years.)It really comes down to what each model's programmer's focus was on when they built it.(Edit: sorry all on the rambling... been on a deep dive rabbit hole lately looking (again) into how it all works and the debates on the ethics around AI usage. Have read soooo many articles and threads in the past week.)At this point I only play Travels of Terror for the fun of it if I'm in the mood, not for the Seeds. I'm glad the game is there. One of those types of games I wish the site had year round.Except for the people who are really good at word scrambles and can do those things in seconds, I don't think too many people play it just for the seeds. Not when Feeding can get seeds so much quicker. Which I know in previous years some people have claimed to be able to solve them in a minute or less. It usually takes me about 5 to 10 minutes.Edit after myridium's reply:I swear I know the different between the two... my brain just keeps lumping them together, but because of the neurological condition I've been suffering from, my brain keeps needing to be given nudges to remind it. I'm constantly having to re-read the same information on anything. So frustrating that almost nothing sticks anymore. -_-
@snowywinter the use of machine learning in academic fields has existed long before the rise of LLMs. I get pretty annoyed when AI bros tout the use of LLMs and point to machine learning (specifically ML, because LLMs are different) in the fields of gene research or yes, historical reconstruction, because any academic worth their salt working in the field of protein research or cancer diagnosis would have to train their neural network on highly specific datasets and not scrape the entire world wide web for their analysis.frankly, your average person has little use for a large language model (you can say writing emails or doing travels of terror on eggcave dot com but these are minor things that can be done with a 'dumb' program or just by using a brain). machine learning is a separate subsect of artificial intelligence, and also not really what is being discussed for this issue in particular
jarsha • 2 days ago
What I like most about this event is that there is a wide variety of ways to earn seeds, so if one way is too hard or just not a method you're into, there are alternate games and activities to engage in to earn them. They all require some form of effort, patience, luck, or knowledge. I do consider outsourcing those things (effort, patience, luck, knowledge) to an AI to be cheating. Despite that, I don't ultimately care as I don't feel that someone using AI on that stall is in any way impacting my own ability to earn seeds. I guess I'm just of the opinion that it seems more pointless to spend all that time trying to wrestle with AI rather than just focus on other stalls and feeding.I personally don't have the memory, cleverness or patience to try and unscramble the travel names, so I just don't engage with that stall. I do think it would be cool if that stall was on the leaderboards because I'm curious of those who are good at it and how many they have successfully unscrambled.