I’m going to build the matrix, & you can’t stop me

0:00 I was 9 years old when I watched the culture shifting film The Matrix.

0:04 So, I didn't fully understand what they were gathered about at the time.

0:07 But what I did understand was that there was

0:09 a simulated world that was separate from the real world.

0:12 And regular people like you and me could plug in and essentially become gods.

0:16 And as a huge fan of video games and sci-fi,

0:19 the concept behind The Matrix immediately captured me.

0:22 And ever since, I've wanted to build my own Matrix simulation.

0:26 Following that, I played Sim City.

0:28 And while most probably seen a quirky little citybuilder,

0:31 I felt the power of building my own matrix.

0:34 But the problem was that it was really hard

0:35 to feel that the city was real on a macro level when there was no way to peep

0:39 in on a single citizen's life on the micro level.

0:42 But then I played the Sims and I thought

0:44 this was the missing micro piece of the puzzle.

0:46 If in the Sims you follow a citizen's day-to-day life,

0:49 and in Sim City you build the city for them to live in, surely

0:52 the developers are working to merge these two at some point in the future.

0:56 Right.

0:57 Right.

0:58 Well, I've been waiting 26 years for that dream and it's never came.

1:02 They fumbled with Sim City 2013 and destroyed that franchise.

1:06 And The Sims is nothing now more than a neglected

1:09 stepchild with game-breaking bugs old enough to legally drink alcohol.

1:12 Clearly, this vision isn't coming to sweep me off my feet anytime soon.

1:16 Now, there are some indie successors like City Skylines,

1:19 for example, which builds on top of what The Sims started,

1:22 but it severely lacks in the most important area, at least to me.

1:26 the micro layer.

1:28 Now, in City Skylines,

1:29 they do simulate a completed route of NPC getting from point A to B,

1:33 and it's actually a lot of fun to watch it in a first-person view.

1:36 You get to take in all the views of the city

1:38 that you've built brick by brick as if you were walking through it.

1:41 But the NPCs have no preferences, no lovers or enemies, no ambitions.

1:46 They're just simulation fodder.

1:48 Of course, this makes sense for a game like City Skylines,

1:51 but this makes it impossible to reach my dream of a Matrix Sim.

1:54 But whatever, I can cry myself to sleep about it in my own time.

1:57 Today, I just want to detail what my dream Matrix sim would look [music] like.

2:01 And to start off with, it can take three different forms.

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3:53 Now, back to the video.

3:54 Form one, real time single simulation.

3:57 Form two, real time distributed simulation.

4:00 and form three, timestep simulation,

4:03 in which any of these forms I'd be very satisfied to play.

4:06 So straight up, if it's not obvious by now,

4:09 my dream is to build a matrix in where the macro world is

4:12 built by the collaborative actions on the micro level full of rich history,

4:16 life stories, all in the world that makes sense.

4:20 And of course, there needs to be a feature

4:22 where you can control a character and affect

4:23 change on the world because is it really a matrix sim if there is no Neo?

4:27 And in the first form, real-time single simulation.

4:30 I know I just talked up on how this game is lacking,

4:33 but it's satisfying density logistics through traffic and crowd

4:36 simulation is ripe for creating rich NPC stories.

4:40 So, imagine City Skylines, right?

4:42 But you could choose to follow one NPC's life from birth to death.

4:46 You'll be able to see how when they move from the countryside to the city,

4:49 it completely reshaped their life.

4:50 how maybe working long hours caused them to get in a fatal car accident,

4:54 which then inspired their kids to become politicians so

4:57 they can change work hour policies, for example, right?

5:00 You get the vision.

5:01 And I don't know about you, but if City Skylines had this feature,

5:04 I'd probably have about 40,000 hours logged

5:06 on that game just letting it run 24/7.

5:09 In the second form, realtime distributed simulation,

5:12 again, imagine City Skylines, right?

5:14 But every NPC has its own dedicated computer to simulate their life.

5:19 And that's kind of what I was attempting to do with this project.

5:22 The idea here would have a wall of these computers together in a shared world,

5:26 all working together to build the type of world that they want to live in.

5:29 The only real difference with this form is that you'd

5:31 be able to follow all NPCs at the same exact time.

5:34 And ideally, you could scale this up to tens of thousands

5:38 of participating NPCs by simply just adding a new device.

5:41 Out of the three forms, I think this is probably closest to the matrix

5:44 because one device equals one NPC brain.

5:48 And in the third form, timestep simulation.

5:51 Imagine if in Sim City, the game pauses, simulates every NPC's decision,

5:56 simulates the game for 10 seconds,

5:58 and then pauses again to repeat, repeat, repeat.

6:01 This form basically breaks the simulation down into a series of time steps,

6:06 and the next time step isn't ran until every

6:08 NPC has computed what it wants to do next.

6:11 And with this form, you wouldn't have to worry about thousands of NPCs

6:14 lagging up the CPU in real time because it's a time series.

6:18 And this form would also make it really easy

6:20 to observe any point in history for any NPC.

6:24 Now, my preferred form is form two or three,

6:26 probably because I can distribute the compute on both of them,

6:29 opening up near limitless compute possibilities to run the sim.

6:33 But the question is, if I have the design all figured out,

6:36 why don't I just go and build it?

6:38 I mean, weird coding projects is what I do on this channel, after all.

6:41 Well, I've tried to make form 3 in a previous video.

6:44 But I ran into one of the biggest issues

6:46 that I find trying to bring this vision to life.

6:48 Making intelligence varied enough to simulate unique patterns.

6:52 [music] You see, most games like this heavily

6:54 rely on the player's input to design everything.

6:57 But in order to build the matrix,

6:59 we have to rely on the NPCs to be able to do this themselves.

7:03 Because for example, if I place an important building down in City Skylines,

7:07 I likely just place it there because the game

7:10 said it'd give me a reward if I did.

7:11 So likely there isn't any real story behind my decision.

7:15 However, in real life, most downtowns are placed near rivers, lakes,

7:19 and coasts because of how much easier it makes to trade with other communities.

7:23 So this is storytelling.

7:25 This is not.

7:26 But the issue is that it's incredibly difficult

7:29 to build NPCs to even understand the importance of water,

7:32 trade, cities, and that's on top of the personal

7:36 emergence stuff about itself that it needs to correlate.

7:38 But we're living in the age of language models,

7:41 which I honestly do believe holds the key to building a satisfying matrix.

7:45 But it's not clear yet to me how to effectively [music] utilize them.

7:49 Claude did really well in the last test, but I was hit the rate limit.

7:53 Funny enough, I talked to someone who worked on Claude and raised this issue

7:56 to them and they basically told me it's just what they got to do.

7:58 Keep the business afloat.

7:59 So, Claude's true potential is unknown,

8:01 but I'll keep on playing with it because uh you can't

8:04 stop me from building the Matrix.

8:06 But if I were to develop my dream Matrix

8:08 Sim starting right now, how would I do it?

8:11 Well, I'd likely start with form 3.

8:13 I'd create a pretty simplistic grid world and fill

8:16 it with a bunch of environment changing interactions.

8:18 Place block here.

8:20 Gather a resource and put it here.

8:22 craft tools to better hunt animals, stuff like that.

8:25 And I would probably use Claw to reason

8:27 for all the NPCs because from my experience so far,

8:29 it seems Claude has no competition when it comes to reasoning.

8:32 And once I get the engine into a good spot,

8:34 I'd probably look into some means of adding distribution to the sim.

8:38 That way, there is no limit to how big I can scale it.

8:40 But please do not be fooled.

8:42 Building the simple grid world step is a juggernaut of a task.

8:46 I essentially would have to build my own Minecraft engine of sorts if I

8:50 want this project to be impactful because

8:52 the more complex interactions [music] the world has,

8:54 the more impressive the sim can be.

8:56 But if you want me to stop complaining and get to work building it,

8:59 let me know in the comments.

9:00 I'm always fishing for a future content to make.

9:02 And shout out to my glorious patrons on screen.

9:04 You can watch all my videos adree over on Patreon

9:07 by joining in the lowest tier of a dollar.

9:09 And um know that the Matrix has you.

9:13 [music]