The Second Past — Survive History

Finally: Travel back in time with nothing but your knowledge

Historical Games

Education

Artificial Intelligence

This was the most 'passion' passion project I've ever built. Never been more excited to share sth with this community. ------ The Backstory of this project ------ (skip if you want but please don't 👉👈) When GPT4 first came out I built an MVP of this just for myself (it looked horrid) just to see if it was any fun. The principle was (and is) simple: Use AI to build an Occam's Razor type reality engine: it's aware of local context (the era, the story so far, the inventory you have), takes what you want to do (what you type in), breaks it down into what needs to be realistically true for that to happen OR for it to fail OR for you to actually die. Then, an unbiased separate model allocates probabilities, a random number is generated, your fate is determined, and so on. When the first build was ready I was insanely curios, because in front of me I had an MVP of a never-before-seen class of game: completely nondeterministic, anything is truly possible. So then the questions: Could I conquer the world? Could i discover electricity and use it to shape the future of humanity with a massively unfair advantage? Etc etc etc (to infinity) I had a surprising amount of fun. After having starved to death on my first few tries, I remember stumbling upon a castle randomly walking around. I surveyed the castle (had already become afraid of dying and starting again), snuck in at night, stole some armour and a sword and some food and left, out of fear of getting caught and killed. I then found a village. The realism of the game was way beyond what I had expected, the fear of dying and starting from start was so big that I was scared to do anything. I had played enough to know that going to attack the villagers would get me killed, so I tried something creative: "Hunt a squirrel, dress the armour, cover myself in blood, run into the village screaming I'm the last survivor from a battle with some vikings nearby that are coming to pillage the village and tell them to evacuate" Then the wait for the response... I promise I was glued to the screen. It worked! With 2% margin of error it worked, they believed me and ran. I then stole all their stuff. I was overjoyed. Finally made it out of complete poverty. I then started a lumberjack business for passive income, recruited some kids to travel the country in search of academics to recruit. Curiosity to test the game got the better of me and I build a ship to see if I could get to America, and I died on the way there in a storm. ------- Backstory Over -------- I'm really only doing this for the plot. This is a really difficult game to test given that the possibilities are endless and I'm so curious what is actually possible. I built the 'Paths' page to see all the things all users (or their AIs) have tried. This is the data visualisation of how the players will brute-force historic reality, and I so can't wait to see it grow, it's basically a social-historical experiment. I'm so curious to see if anyone will actually do insane things and see their repercussions like: meet Napoleon, assassinate H*tler, conquer the world, etc etc etc. Any feedback is super welcome, there's a form on the Changelog page. Feel free to get in touch I guess it mostly resembles a rogue-like game, although this wasn't by design, and, at first, I added a save feature in case you get somewhere super promising. If you run into any problems, reach out to me on the game, I'll do my best to help out. I hope you have fun. -------------- P.S: Some tips from what I've learned so far (mostly on 1500s England) ---------- 1. These guys really had a lot more laws than I had expected, and they're super strict on vagrancy, which is a problem early game. I'd advise a humble start, use the Auto-play mode to get a job, provide some value, get some paperwork. 2. If it's super important for you to achieve something (to get success rather than fail) - be very specific about how you would do it, especially on technical things. I had a test run where I managed to get to gunpowder, but died hit by a goddamn horse and carriage (super randomly was like 0.8% chance) - but i did my research, sourced the items, etc 3. Use the AI mode, it saves you a lot of time. Be careful what you tell it to avoid. If it submits something you think is risky, hit pause quickly and it will cancel the action and let you rewrite it. 4. Being cunning seems to work quite well, until you get caught. Then it seems better to be highly respectful and apologetic. 5. (ww2) - you really wanna avoid the gestapo :))) 6. !!! (very important): language matters a lot. If you speak french, german, latin (or... can use an ai to do it for you, let's face it, i can't stop you from doing that) it really helps HAVE FUN OMG IM SO EXCITED FOR PEOPLE TO TRY THIS.