Hello! 👋
Here's a quick update of what I've been up to in November!
1. Utilitarian Ethics in Minecraft
I'm building an "utilitarian advisor" which guides the actions of an AI in Minecraft. The goal is to create an ethical AI that maximizes the utility of any Minecraft world. I'm using Minecraft as the environment because it's a highly open-ended space where many paths to increasing utility can be explored.
I've implemented an agent which "plays" Minecraft through the built in command line interface. An LLM generates a plan, which is converted into Minecraft commands, and executed within the game.
You can read about it here: omnipotent-minecraft-ai-loop
The ideal would be to create an ethical advisor which can advise both an agent like Voyager and one which operates at a much higher level such as the one described in the above link.
2. Scinapse Research Proposal
I participated in the Undergraduate Science Case Competition. It's like a hackathon for research proposals. I (with my team of 3 other people) had to write a research proposal for a novel idea in the space of reproductive health.
We wrote our proposal on the classification of cancer in the fallopian tubes using convolutional neural networks.
You can read our proposal here: pftc-classification
3. Making Training Swords
One of my close friends and I compete in Historical European Martial Arts and we're working on building training broadswords. Real broadswords are very expensive (multiple hundreds of dollars each), but we want to practice together on a low budget.
We've figured out a good design for the padded blades, but we're struggling with the design of the basket. We want to keep it cheap, but solid enough to hold off strikes from a padded PVC pipe without caving in.
We're prototyping basket hilts made of EVA foam, and then stitched into shape using paracord. The EVA foam can absorb the impact without caving, but the stitching is ripping through the foam. We're planning to experiment with a few other shapes for the basket, and using contact cement to hold it together.
Those are my highlights of this month.
I'll be back in your inbox in ~30 days.
Thanks for reading 👋
Nicolas Gatien