Square Enix’s AI tech preview is speedrun in only 5 min using a clever strategy

A player has attempted a speedrun of SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE, which was recently released on Steam by Square Enix. The speedrun is completed using Japanese input, and while many players have had trouble getting the AI to listen to their commands, this player manages to artfully manipulate it, solving the case in under 5 minutes.
 

The tech preview is based on The Portopia Serial Murder Case, an adventure game by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii. It serves as an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is used to interpret the text that is entered by the player. By conducting deep learning on a large set of text data, it becomes possible for the system to understand complex text and generate responses.

On the other hand, the tech preview does not currently include a conversation function based on Natural Language Generation (NLG), as this was intentionally omitted prior to release due to the risk of the AI providing unethical responses. They plan to offer the NLG functionality once they are able to provide a secure environment that players can enjoy based on further research.

This lack of NLG may be the reason that the range of questions that your AI partner, Yasu, can answer is rather small in the current version. This also means that the words and questions required to get the responses needed to advance through the game are to some degree fixed.

The player who attempted a speedrun of the tech preview is Ginu Yamabuki. Through the use of short phrases that can still be understood by the AI, Ginu is able to input commands at a rapid pace. Since the game is controlled through a command input system, copying and pasting commands was prohibited for the speedrun.

As a result of using phrases that are as short as possible, Ginu interacts with the AI in a rather commanding and overbearing way. (Phrases giving curt commands in Japanese are normally much shorter than a polite request.) Some instructions are so short they are almost like cryptic codewords, and the way Yasu can understand them so easily makes it seem like he’s an exceedingly perceptive character, which is quite contrary to how most players would feel about him during a normal playthrough.

One particularly strange example of this occurs in the Japanese version when you instruct Yasu to go to the port. While you are expected to input  港に行け (Minato ni ike, meaning, “go to the port”), inputting なぐれ (Nagure, meaning, “hit someone/something”) instead will for some reason still result in Yasu understanding that you want to go to the port. Perhaps Yasu’s punch packs so much power that he can send you flying straight to your destination. Ginu makes use of these kinds of techniques to cut down on the length of the inputs used during their speedrun.

In the end, Ginu was able to complete the tech preview in only 4 m 40 s 93 ms. This accomplishment is surely the result of incredibly short yet accurate commands that show a thorough understanding of AI Yasu combined with a fast typing speed. After finishing the run, Ginu noted, “Speedrunning this tech preview feels more like playing a typing game than an adventure game.” Although playing the tech preview normally is often accompanied by a lot of frustration when the AI won’t properly respond to your instructions, Ginu has shown that speedrunning it can provide a different kind of enjoyment.

As mentioned previously, there is the possibility that an NLG conversation function will be added to the tech preview in a future update. If that happens, we may see even more ridiculous conversations with Yasu than we come across now.

The Steam page for SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE can be found here.

Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-04-25 19:19 JST)