I find myself more intrigued by Infinite Craft's inner workings than the actual act of playing it. My first thought when I saw a screenshot of its mechanics via social media was "isn't that just that one mobile game from when those were new?" and sure enough after wracking my brain trying to remember the name I found that I was thinking of Doodle God, an iphone game from the first wave of popular mobile titles like angry birds, fruit ninja, etc

The concept is similar but Infinite Craft is much more an unstructured sandbox than DG. Its concept is simplicity itself, you combine words with other words to make new ones via some method of semantic association and formula for determining combinations through generative AI. The claim is that this collection of words and sentences is truly infinite and I believe it. As silly as the game is in concept, under the surface its essentially an application of natural language processing, which is an absolutely mindmelting field where computer science, linguistics and philosophy all meet to make the most impenetrable theoretic framework to describe how a system can be devised to make unicorn + death = dead unicorn.

I should preface the rest of this review by saying that I am very much not an expert by any means and that you should look into this yourself. In fact, NLP was the subject which made me drop out of my Computer Science Degree because I hated it so much (well, it also didn't help that this was during Covid so we had to learn this shit remotely), but I know a little bit more than most.

The main problem that NLP needs to "solve" is that a computer doesn't know natural languages (i.e english, mandarin, russian etc) but we do. Hence in order to analyse anything relating to natural language we need to make systems to make it parseable by an algorithm. Its one of those things where its such an integral and unconscious part of human cognition that you don't realize how complex of a task it is to understand words and phrases. One task we got early on was analysing a corpus of Amazon Reviews and determining which reviews were positive and which were negative. Even before any kind of analysis of the review as a whole can be performed you need to parse the whole thing and tokenise the individual words (easy in english admittedly, its just spaces) but then you also need to analyse the individual words and perform Word Sense Disambiguation i.e if the word smith appears in the review you need to determine using adjacent words if it means the name smith or the profession smith or the act of smithing. Even further you have stuff like entity linking, where certain words form part of a broader entity for e.g Duke of Parma refers to a single thing rather than 3 separate unrelated words. It was quite frankly, a nightmare which was nevertheless pretty interesting to learn about. Thankfully we had plenty of resources to tackle these issues (computer science is one of the most "standing on the shoulders of giants" discipline there is) and one resource I was reminded of when playing Infinite Craft was WordNet.

Wordnet is a lexical database, which is a fancy way of saying essentially a beefed up dictionary. Containing not only words and their meanings but also its relations in terms of hypernyms and hyponyms. I.e Amphibian is a Hypernym for Frog, and Oak is a Hyponym of Tree. You can also then make connections between words if they share Hypernyms (i.e we can tell the system that Crocodile, Alligator and Komodo dragon are all "coordinate terms" because they share the hypernym Reptile) and a whole bunch of other things that would take forever to fully explain. In essence, its a database that helps us determine semantic fields for words by essentially outsourcing the work to pre-made materials by humans. Another example would be SimLex-999 which asked people to rank word-pairs between 0-10 in terms of how related they were to each other and produced a dataset with these word pairs.

This is all to say, analysing language such as english is a herculean task, and I hope one day we get a peek behind the curtain at how the language model used by infinite craft works, because it really is quite interesting. The technology is still nevertheless quite rough at times; which can be forgiven mostly because the freeform sandbox nature of its mechanics makes its imprecision and unknowability kind of a non-issue. Hence, all the screenshots of funny combinations of pop culture properties and not the more banal or incoherent combinations that are swiftly forgotten as a new possibility occurs. If it were a more structured set of challenges like Doodle God you would swiftly get blocked by the eternal "point and click" problem of having to think about the one solitary solution and combination which made sense to the designer of combining glue + mummy to make papier maché. So what if most combinations are not particularly engaging or don't produce progress, the more words you make the more words you CAN make through combining previous words with older ones. Sometimes this runs into the issue that certain strings of words presumably associated by the game as part of the same semantic field seem to chain back into themselves. I.e fire + ash makes lava, lava + mud = volcano, volcano + fire makes ash etc. Another issue is, some combinations simply didnt make sense, but of course no system could ever produce infinitely many combinations which would seem reasonable to all people, especially when getting to more abstract concepts. Idk what a dead unicorn + candy would make if they were magically sealed together, but I guess "zombie unicorn" is as good an answer as any.

Some words cannot be combined at all, I guess we really are stuck with the "I don't know how to do that" problem of adventure games once more.

Infinite Craft is more of a novelty than a game one would feasibly dedicate themselves to, by a developer who seems quite married to the idea of short, communal browser based experiences. Their website is definitely worth a look beyond IC, its a lovely collection of experiments.

There is one aspect of the game I appreciated, despite the simplicity, Infinite Craft provides a sort of word based micro-storytelling, similar to other implementations of generative AI based on user input. I remember reading an interview given by Gareth Damian Martin, the Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters dev where they said about their work on "procedural poetry" that even seemingly random or computer generated sequences form a broader sequence (like a story) by Humans' tendencies to fill in the blanks and assign patterns to those which seemingly have none. I think we've all extrapolated seemingly human charcteristics and motivations to NPCs based on certain intended and unintended behaviours. Or even simpler than that, ask a pet owner what their dog/cat's personality is, they will go wild anthropomorphising the animal's thought process to explain their every action.

Tree of Life + Tree of Death = Tree of Knowledge
Tree of Knowledge + Party = Adam and Eve

2 Equations to summarise one of the key episodes of Genesis in christian lore which would not be nearly as impressive if a human had manually come up with such a combination, nor if I hadn't spent most of my time getting much more pedestrian or nonsensical combinations like candy + fisherman = sugar daddy.

Glad to have my spot in history.

Neal's really good at making quick games that aren't really necessary of any more than a few words, yet are still fun to dick around with for a good while. Once you get it, you get it. You'll be throwing shit together for a bit before you come up with an idea and spend the next few hours struggling to craft that single ingredient you need to start the 20 item long web to get there.

i did very much enjoy trying to make all the sailor scouts and soyjaking every time i got one though (sorry chibi moon i really couldnt figure that one out)

weirdly kind of ends up being a condemnation of AI, though not intentionally. when looking at games in the “fuse stuff together” genre popularized in the flash game days (little alchemy, doodle god, etc), those games were finite, but they were sensible, whereas this game is ‘infinite’ but only in the sense that it makes ai generated slurry after a certain point. “wow you combined rainbow dinosaur and steam train dragon to make rainbow steam dinosaur train” just utter drivel. go play little alchemy

Fun little game to mess around with for like an hour.
Some first discoveries I got were:
Alien Occupy Wall Street
President Dimitrescu (I am not a Resident Evil Fan)
Dinosaur Evil 6 (Again, I repeat, I am not a resident evil fan lol)

Silly little time-waster browser game I could see kids playing while stuck in computer lab or something. It's not the most exciting experience in the world from a gameplay standpoint as all you're doing is just dragging little boxes of text on top of each other to see what new words the AI systems running in the background will concoct as you do. So instead, the amusement comes from seeing exactly what kind of crazy things you can "create" for a cheap laugh with your dumb friends, and maybe the serotonin of the game congratulating you on being the first person to uncover some crazy new combination.

While personally none of that is enough to ever bring me back again for more, I can definitely still see this being super addictive for the right person. Plus, it is legitimately impressive the massive library of objects, creatures, concepts, celebrity names, fictional entities, and much more you can amass from the mere four classical elements you start off with. The fact that there's a mobile-friendly version of the site so that you can play on your phone whenever you have internet access, although not the ideal method due to the amount of scrolling you'll eventually have to do, is also a nice touch. All in all, not quite for me, but I think this succeeds pretty well at everything it sets out to do and is reasonably commendable regardless as a result.

7/10

some of my First Discoveries:
Octohorse
Sex Nun
The Return Of The Homie
/r/showerthoughts
Neil Confused

Generative AI wasn't always so revolting disheartening. The appeal I found in programs like Big Sleep and the early versions of AI Dungeon was always in their chaotic flaws. Big Sleep produced grotesque, surreal images that could only be tangentially related to your prompt's concept. For early AI Dungeon, it had something charming in its inability to cohesively keep a story together and tendency to go off the rails to a batshit insane degree. Modern generative AI programs have smoothed out all those goofy edges, leaving their software less silly and more uncanny.

Infinite Craft brings generative AI to the old alchemy game trend. Like those games, the only goal is continuing to find as many valid combinations as the game allows. This grows your set of ingredients to work with. Every solution can hopefully serve as a part of another experiment.
The limitations on solutions used to be what the developers had already devised. With Infinite Craft, that restriction has been pushed all the way to the limits of a large language model. This reliance on machines for solutions leaves the game unable to match all of what was special and precious in what inspired it. This genre used to require some thought towards making concocted combinations to solve curated puzzles. Emotional intent is what chose elements in games like Little Alchemy and Doodle God.
In Infinite Craft, the systems in play have taken out all of that human expression to become an almost emotionless toy. New discoveries feel inevitable and far less wonderful. Your results are spat out by a heartless machine.

To make up for the lost human input, the AI is sufficiently absurd. As the phrases you combine stray further from your initial set, you'll find baffling random results and odd combinations. The deeper you go, the more chaos ensues. You may find yourself wondering how you got so deep in a long string of nonsense.
If Infinite Craft was made with more reasonable interpretations of inputs from its LLM, it would be a far less charming experience. This neat little time waster ends up being a pleasant trip back to that more experimental era of generative AI software.