(Image credit: Nick Walton)

It's easy to imagine advances in AI will have an impact on strategy games and digital versions of board games like Chess and Go, but one of the most interesting implementations of AI technology I've seen so far is a text adventure.

AI Dungeon 2 by Nick Walton uses OpenAI to simulate an old-school text adventure of the Zork variety, only instead of having to read the designer's mind to figure out what to type to use this thing on that thing, you write plain English and get results. It helps to start sentences with verbs but you'll get a response to basically anything, and that response is likely to be surprising. I played a wizard exploring a ruin and within a handful of turns I'd found out I was responsible for the state of these ruins and confronted a younger version of myself.

Sometimes it doesn't work so well, and you might hit a loop or be stymied or it might even crash. But when it works it's intense, like having a conversation with one of those artificial therapy bots only it's actually a Dungeon Master running a surrealist game of D&D. Other players have been sharing their games, and I've seen a cure for zombie-ism, an attempt at summoning dragons gone confusingly awry, and a detective with laser eyes.

You can play AI Dungeon 2 in your browser, but give it a couple of minutes to load. It's apparently using "OpenAI's largest 1.5B parameter model", and has been trained on the archive of interactive fiction at chooseyourstory.com.