Robert Zubek

Robert Zubek

@rzubek.bsky.social

Making games for longer than seems advisable. AI lead at Take-Two; earlier at SomaSim, Zynga, EA etc. Doctor of AI, under the hippocratic oath bound to help all game AIs. Author: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043915/ Hello from Chicago!

1,322 Followers 389 Following 372 Posts Joined Jul 2023
2 months ago
Preview
ACM is Now Fully Open Access! As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing co...

The ACM Digital Library is now 100% open access? This seems like a pretty big deal. www.acm.org/articles/bul...

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5 months ago

Oh that is interesting, and especially looking back at that very difficult period of time - which keeps reverberating, even though chronologically it's way in the past.

Looking forward to reading!

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5 months ago

Whoa didn't know you have a new book out!

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5 months ago

E.g. in City of Gangsters we explicitly wanted to be able to produce stories of illicit business deals but also betreyal and revenge, and this drove systems design.

Each game will have its own stories of course! But starting with stories is a powerful technique.

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5 months ago

As game devs were used to thinking of player experience and flow, and then back solving for systems and mechanics.

Similarly with social sims, but starting with stories (experienced first hand), and then back solving for systems that can generate those.

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5 months ago

Yes, exactly this:

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5 months ago

We'll be announcing the AIIDE'25 keynotes in the next couple of weeks and our first one to announce is this really exciting look at applying research work in industry from @luked.bsky.social and Nadine Perez!

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6 months ago

Interesting that they released it to the public, and not just to partners

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7 months ago

To celebrate over 20 years of AAIDE we want to highlight our Best Paper winners so far!

Every week we will add one to this thread until we've caught up πŸ‘Ύ

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6 months ago

That is amazing news. Congratulations to the whole team!

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7 months ago

"Oh what's this on Steam, a Wholesome Games Celebration of games that 'inspire hope, joy, and introspection'? Don't mind if I do!" he said to himself, and booted up Crusader Kings III.

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7 months ago

I have a running theory that the killer app for LLMs is going to be as translators from ambiguous human language to all sorts of formal systems.

E.g. getting an LLM to produce good Prolog code sounds maybe viable?

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7 months ago

Ok this was kind of a wild game, and an unexpected collaboration between Firaxis and EA.

Basically you built golf courses for little computer people, and they walked around, played, and judged your designs.

It was great. :)

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7 months ago

#GenCon2025: Oh wow, Elements of Game Design is in absolutely stunning company at the MIT Press booth - right between @chaimg.bsky.social 's Building SimCity and @rich-lem.bsky.social 's Playful Production Process, both amazing.

And such a great selection of RPG / D&D books on the upper shelf!

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7 months ago

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

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7 months ago

You and me both!

Except for me that was the last paper in grad school :)

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7 months ago

the actual experts: β€œit can do at best 20% of the things you’re asking for and of the actual interesting stuff it CAN do which doesn’t take over existing human work, none of your development processes are set up to incorporate that”

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7 months ago

Thanks for the reco - it looks really interesting!

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8 months ago

Oh yeah that is unexpected!

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8 months ago

Yeah, it's a convenient way to get something *kinda like* a fuzzy semantics similarity, but it's definitely not actual semantics, and there's a bunch of non-semantic info mixed in there too (e.g. word morphology).

And now I'm curious if any interesting use cases stand out?

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8 months ago

I'm physically in pain reading this article

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8 months ago

...and it's such a fantastic, innovative indie visual novel. Ware's quote is right on. Recommended!

And on Saturday I was back at Quimby's buying Book Two because I *had to* learn how this world turns out. :)

(And if you're in Chicago, both Quimby's and Women and Children First have it in stock!)

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8 months ago
Preview
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters In this debut, which takes the form of a fictional graphic diary, a 10-year-old girl tries to solve a murder. 2025 Whiting Award WINNER in Fiction Kirkus Reviews Best 100 Books of the Century (So Far)...

I was at Quimby's randomly on Friday, and decided to buy My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book One, mainly because of the quote on the cover ("absolutely astonishing") from Chris Ware whose work I've followed for decades... 1/2

www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-...

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9 months ago

No better way to celebrate

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9 months ago

Top notch biting satire, no notes :)

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9 months ago
Editing a word document in a browser without using Google or Microsoft

What are the European alternatives to Google Docs and Microsoft 365 for students, writers, and project workers?

I couldn't find any good answers, so I have reviewed the four top packages and provided my recommendations. I hope you find it useful!

www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2...

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9 months ago

WE ALREADY HIT OUR FIRST STRETCH GOAL!! This is madness!!

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9 months ago
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Just FYI @mitpress.bsky.social this is still happening, but now it's not intermittent anymore. Tested across multiple browsers. Could it be a Cloudflare misconfiguration?

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9 months ago
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New blog post: Using flow field pathfinding on a voronoi procedurally generated map to simulate 20,000 traders moving around

www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-05...

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10 months ago

Wait what's the JM Jarre connection? 🎹

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