Nice job!

[k2xl]

Thanks for doing this. Randomly stumbled upon this project.

Did you ever extend it?

[davidspencer6174]

Hi Danny! Thanks for taking a look 😄

We tried a couple of other things that didn't make it into the repository. I was really hoping some kind of reinforcement learning ideas might help - for example, having one "levelmaker" agent and one solver agent, and having them compete (where the levelmaker tries to make levels which the solver solves but takes a long time to solve, and the solver tries to take a shorter amount of time to solve them). It turned out to be too difficult to get the levelmaker agent we tried to learn anything. In the end, pretty much everything we tried suffers from delusions at some point in most levels, where it thinks the right move is incredibly unlikely, and this prevents it from finding the solution. I don't know whether the answer is more data/training for the NN, smarter search, reinforcement learning, or a different approach altogether.

I will probably pick up the project again at some point, but I'm in my first couple of years of grad school, and coursework and qualifying exams have pushed aside personal projects. That said, if you're into AI programming and you want to try anything out, I'd be happy to try to help explain the code - I don't know whether I've documented it well enough for it to be readable 😛

I've been wondering - would it be possible to get a data dump of everyone's levels in Psychopath 2 (with their levels associated with their usernames, of course)? I ask partially because it might make data generation easier (I wouldn't have to manually go to pages to get level codes) and partially because I'll be sad when browsers start dropping Flash support and I'll no longer have access to the amazing levels people have made. Of course, I definitely understand if you can't or would rather not.

By the way, I want to thank you for making the game, and for keeping the site up all this time. It's a really wonderful, challenging game and I have a lot of great memories of the community that sprung from it. 😃

[k2xl]

Thank you. And yes I probably could get a DB dump of all the levels if that would help

[davidspencer6174]

That would be great if possible :) Some of the reinforcement learning ideas in particular might be easier with a large sample of levels. I think the relevant fields would be level code, stepcount, author name for attribution, and level name - any storage format for these should be fine, e.g. just a csv. My e-mail is davidspencer6174@gmail.com . Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

[davidspencer6174]

It seems that the server that hosted the levels has been dead for a few months. Do you still have access to the levels? I would love to be able to get a copy of them if so. Thanks!

[k2xl]

Saw your tweet, just found the repo again. Can you remind me how we got this to work before?

[davidspencer6174]

Thanks for the help! I don't think I ever had access to a dump of the levels before; I was just copy-pasting the level codes manually from the Psychopath 2 website in the past. I can't do that anymore, though, as the Psychopath 2 website doesn't seem to be able to load levels now.

[davidspencer6174]

Any luck? If there's no way to do a dump of the levels, I could continue downloading the level codes manually if it's possible to get the game running again. I know it's been ages, though, so I'd definitely understand if the levels are lost or if it's too annoying to figure out how to put things back together.