We're playing Minecraft and we have no hints.
YouTuber PiroPito wanted to beat Minecraft without ever looking anything up. He had never played before.
Over a few hundred hours, the Achievements table provided PiroPito with the hints needed to complete the game.
The Achievements Table
In 2011, Notch was defending his new idea to reporters. He wanted to add an Achievements table.
In Minecraft, you decide what you want to accomplish. Would Achievements change that?
"I've had the idea to make achievements kind of like the
in-game questing. You'd be able to see the first achievement
in a tree of achievements, and you have to unlock the top
ones first before you can unlock the ones further down. I'd
want these achievements to feel like things that you can
try, rather than these things you have to do. People can
follow them, but only if they want to."
(Feb 25 2011, Gamasutra)
Achievements wouldn't over-reward the player. They would be a ladder, teaching skills and game mechanics to new players.
Fire-Rock goes deeper
One achievement in Minecraft is "We Need to Go Deeper", which unlocks a new dimension called the Nether.
The Player is given the hint: "Build, light and enter a Nether Portal", alongside a thumbnail of one block of Obsidian.
PiroPito was stumped.
A Nether Portal is assembled by placing at least 10 blocks of obsidian into a vertical rectangular frame, then lighting the open center on fire.
There is nothing else quite like this in the game.
PiroPito spent 3 days building Obsidian structures in random configurations and lighting them on fire. He wondered if he might have to craft it somehow.
This was the only time in the series he had to get help. He opted to request just one bit of information:
"Do Nether Portal Recipe really exist? Please tell me only [YES] or [No]"
"[No]"
This closed a large search-space. He still needed more brute-force search, but he finally found the correct configuration and entered the Nether.
Years later, Mojang added Ruined Portals to the game, providing new players a better hint as to how a Portal might look.
Fans credit PiroPito as the motivation for this update.
If it weren't for the Minecraft Wiki growing up, I'm not sure how I would have ever known how to construct a portal. We take Wikis for granted. But what makes something a Wiki?
BITTER OLD MEN IN SUITS
BOMIS (Bitter Old Men In Suits) was a company founded in 1996 that sold ads on the internet.
In 2000, they founded Nupedia, an encyclopedia for the internet … so they could sell more ads, of course.
Nupedia had an expert-verification filter, so adding new articles took time and money. They only published 21 articles in year one.
To parallelize work on the backlog, they launched Wikipedia as a feeder pipeline. On this website, anyone could contribute.
Wikipedia had 18,000 articles by the end of year one.
WIKI-PEDIA MEANS QUICK-EDUCATION
wiki in Wikipedia comes from the Hawaiian word quick, while pedia comes from the Greek word for education, instruction, or child-rearing.
wiki-pedia gives us:
quick-educationquick-instructionquick-child-rearing
Wikis provide means to quickly learn, build, and give birth to new life.
We combined words from human cultures originating across the globe, and now Wikipedia is perhaps the most influential ledger of fact in the world.
It is not a coincidence that Wikipedia is maybe the most influential corpus for LLMs.
No instructions
Right now, we're playing a game without instructions. We're on extra hard mode. We don't even know what we can craft.
The Wiki provides us with a ledger for things which we have discovered. Charted territory.
But what if I wanted to accomplish something that the Wiki couldn't describe. What if I wanted a new feature in the game?
The wiki is charted territory, and the frontier is uncharted wants/desires. It is up to us to decide what we want to see in the world, and then search the space of possible configurations that will allow us to achieve these goals.