As Michael reeves put it: "I made a 5 hour long problem into a 2 and a half month long problem, cause I'm a programmer and that's what we do"

@eduardokerber2931

9 ай бұрын

but now it can be reused every time you need to solve the 5 hour problem, while taking just 4.5 hours, and it works (almost) every time.

@Angel-kr4qo

9 ай бұрын

​@@eduardokerber2931you captured the minimal worth value programming thinking

@MortalWombat1988

9 ай бұрын

HEY! HEY! Why did the Java programmer wear glasses? Because...he can't C#. Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.

@danimgmd3510

9 ай бұрын

not funny

@eduardokerber2931

9 ай бұрын

@@danimgmd3510 shortest autobiography ever

5:48 I can't believe you really just went "assume a spherical car"

@Roset595

26 күн бұрын

Glad someone else caught that 😂

@AtroxSM

19 күн бұрын

Google “peel trident”

@Achridian

19 күн бұрын

Physics problems on tests be like

Respect for the architect dig ❤

@mloxard

9 ай бұрын

It had to be done

@BwompProcessing14

9 ай бұрын

The man himself!

@ZedakiahBoyer

9 ай бұрын

Yo wassup rce love your vids

@hfbdbsijenbd

9 ай бұрын

I like that real engineers treat Civil engineers the same way you treat architects.

@craigwhite1202

9 ай бұрын

Hi rce love your videos and architects are the worst and honestly my sister wants to be an architect and I want to be an engineer

2:00 As an engineer i can confirm that architects will show you some magical item/building that defies the laws of physics and expect you to build it.

@revwroth3698

10 ай бұрын

Lol it's kinda telling that MC Escher wanted to be an architect and actually enrolled in a school for architecture and decorative arts.

@kerz5383

10 ай бұрын

@@revwroth3698 I can imagine being told to make an escher design. I would die.

@revwroth3698

10 ай бұрын

@@kerz5383 not to mention having to implement building codes, imagine having to design wheelchair ramps for all those staircases. That sounds awful to me and I'm not an engineer.

@benruss4130

10 ай бұрын

As an engineer I affirm your statement and would like to add "salesmen" to the list.

@Mike-mu7tk

9 ай бұрын

Summoning Real Civil Engineer..

"But there is a problem, I am way too busy to be playing this right now" - AstroSam Also AstroSam: recreate the whole game

@justinwhite2725

10 ай бұрын

'i didn't have time to play polybridge so I recreated polybridge exactly so am AI can simulate it and solve it for me.'

@maniacone4499

10 ай бұрын

@@justinwhite2725 sounds like a normal programmer to me.

@cezarcatalin1406

9 ай бұрын

Well, he was technically busy redoing the whole game and training an AI to solve it.

comically overcomplicating a small issue to solve it in unnecessary and often slower ways gotta be my favorite genre of youtube videos

@Terminator85BS

9 ай бұрын

have you seen Harder Drive by suckerpinch? my absolute favorite when it comes to this

@matthewwhiteside4619

9 ай бұрын

Would also recommend Harder Drive; Tom7 (suckerpinch) commits horrific crimes against maths and computing.

@noahschuler6388

9 ай бұрын

This concept applied to Structural Engineering would be amazing.

@oliverwaldock9710

9 ай бұрын

Just remember 16 hours of coding can save 20 minutes on planning and/or just actually doing it

@noahschuler6388

9 ай бұрын

@@oliverwaldock9710 If this is done for actual bridges, it'd save a lot of time and money due to optimization.

Damn, nice video! About 7:09: Yours didn't performed like Poly Bridge probably because Poly Bridge has its own custom physics engine, this was done because the Unity3D physics engine is not deterministic, which caused a lot of problems on Poly Bridge 1, not only rerunning the simulation will give you a different result, but game speed also affects the outcome. So for Poly Bridge 2 and on, they're using their own physics engine.

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

Yes, I did some research on it and found many differences, so my version is pretty different. One way I get around it not being deterministic is by running the simulation multiple times and taking the mean of the fitness, although this obviously takes more time.

@NikoCubeRoot

10 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev Part 2 yes no??

@lakastusmanatus

10 ай бұрын

​@@AstroSamDev and for Android

@TlalocTemporal

10 ай бұрын

Since Polybridge is made in unity, I wonder if some bepin tool could extract enough of the physics engine to implement this as an actual solver.

@RobertBleattler

10 ай бұрын

@@TlalocTemporalsince poly bridge is written in c# you can almost certainly access the physics engine through dependency injection.

"Im way to busy to be playing the game" 0:09 " To start off im going to need to replicate the entire game" 0:30

@justaguy311

9 ай бұрын

yeah bro was so lazy to run 1km that he ran a whole Earth lap 💀

@peterfater8992

22 сағат бұрын

@@justaguy311 No, he remade earth, and made an ai run on it instead.

"now one problem we have is it is indestructible. Clearly it was made by engineers. So in order to fix this, we just need some architects" sounds like real civil engineer EDIT: holy shoot 2.1k likes I think that's the most I've gotten before thanks a bunch

@stefanthatcat7143

10 ай бұрын

RCE would be proud of him

@bunny6820

10 ай бұрын

RCE was an architect all along

@hexturne

10 ай бұрын

RCE was the #1 architect hater until he became the #1 architect

@yaroslavpanych2067

10 ай бұрын

RCE FTW!

@yaroslavpanych2067

10 ай бұрын

We are only missing some strong shapes!

You are like if Real Civil Engineer and CodeBullet had a child and I love it

@StephenOwen

9 ай бұрын

I’m instantly going to subscribe to both of those based on this sentence alone 😊

@realrane

9 ай бұрын

your not wrong...

@tozzasque

9 ай бұрын

Thought the exact same!

@darthkarl99

9 ай бұрын

@@StephenOwen If you like real engineering stuff i would recommend PracticalEngineering too.

As someone who has played a ton of Poly Bridge, this is very cool! Also, I dunno if this has been clarified yet, but there is a 1:4 ratio between polygrams and unity's mass units.

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

Oh I see. Since I recorded the audio, I actually changed the weights a lot, and it seems they actually did almost reflect that. But it is good to know now 😁

@masonator__

10 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev Certainly lol. Also, I don't know how well this can translate into your system, but I might be able to give you the current strengths and weights of each material, along with possibly some models from the game if you plan to make any follow-up videos!

@moji3812

5 ай бұрын

Ah ok

I like how this AI shows that trial and error can result in so seemingly complex things like the swining bridge that seemed delibertly made while its just the result of failing many times prior. Just like evolution

@enderiume8282

9 ай бұрын

Yeah i really found it beautiful and honestly, i tyink it can really be compared to a very young child, just trial and error the lifd

"I don't have time to play the game, so I spent time to program the game in unity and trained an ai to play it"

when the world needed him the most, he returned

HE’S BACK!!!

@Cruciblecoder

10 ай бұрын

Yooooooooooo

@gecko_6103

10 ай бұрын

Fnilanyyyyyy!

"this bridge is indestructible since it was made with engineers, so we just need need some architects" utterly comedic

@gamecoder3833

10 ай бұрын

Did you get the reference bro

@yaroslavpanych2067

10 ай бұрын

​@@gamecoder3833probably not

Around 4:22 wouldn't it be better for visualization and filming purposes to do a 10x10 grid of bridges?

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

It actually uses unity's 2d physics system, so having multiple rows moving back in the z axis would overlap collisions, and stacking them vertically could make the ball interfere or bridge pieces. The only way to prevent that would be to build extra barriers or delete falling things, which would reduce performance. And for visualization, it wouldn't be possible to show all of them at once on screen, and I think just showing a single one evolving gets the point across well.

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

To clarify, it would be possible to show them all at once, but they would be too small. And if you were talking only about the video, I wanted to show what the simulation actually looked like.

@Rodasboyy

10 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev I understand! Was just a friendly suggestion from someone who gets 0 out of unity Thanks for explaining 😁

@Rodasboyy

10 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev great video btw! I'm always amazed to see NN getting to the hardest and coolest solution and thinking "Hmm , that's perfect" haha

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

@@Rodasboyy Thank you!

Honestly, half this stuff went over my head, but i can totally get on board with the concept of spending 5x as long avoiding doing something than the original task. Fascinating stuff.

I think if you made closeness to the flag an exponential reward, that might help incentivize reaching the goal. And if you also awarded points for bridge rigidity, that could be good for preventing dangling messes. The rigidity could be scored based on least amount of average travel for each joint node.

We gave something like this as an assignment to students in an evolutionary computation class a while back, and it was a lot of fun. We used a "maximum load" fitness function (keep adding weight until the bridge collapses), and also had students add a cost minimization objective at one point for NSGA-II, though that ran into some fun problems (What bridge minimizes cost? The one where you delete the whole bridge, of course!). On one test problem we were getting really weird results only to find that our scenario was missing one of the two anchor points on the sides of the bridge, so the evolutionary algorithms were desperately trying to keep a huge cantilevered pier from falling over with surprising success!

very good video, only downside I found is that it felt "incomplete" I'd absolutely LOVE to see more of this, tweaking, adding different materials, etc etc it is a pretty good concept and execution, so you definitely could invest some more resources into it. Will definitely turn out to be very good content. Keep up the good work!

That was really well done and enjoyable to watch. I wonder if Poly Bridge 3 has an easily-understood save file format -- you might be able to use that (plus some hairy automation helpers) to test candidate solutions in the real game environment, although it would probably be a lot slower and might suffer from the nondeterministic physics update you mentioned. Unless the PB3 devs have also done work to make their custom physics model fully deterministic (maybe it works out the physics interactions before playing back the animations? Presumably they would need something like this to be able to replay solutions consistently).

The purpose was destroyed by AI holding the car hostage.

I was really hoping for more from this video. Not sure if I'm being unrealistic but it just felt like it started to gather momentum then stopped dead

multiple everything by deltaTime or you're comiting a crime

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

no >:(

@zetrium_

10 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev i know lol

6:10 : connecting to all points gives a better bridge Meanwhile polybridge players: 😅

@b_read6941

10 ай бұрын

Weight!!!!!!! Money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Super interesting! I don't know much about programming, but you explained it in just enough detail to understand the process.

i feel robbed, this video kinda ended abruptly, i was expecting to see more out of the evolution and it figuring out different scenarios

Could you maybe make a part 2? This is an awesome video, and I would love to see how you will improve this project!

Oh man, you would get along so well with RCE. "This bridge is indestructible- clearly it was made by engineers." "To fix this, we need architects." 😂

I would love to see a part 2. Maybe try solving some actual levels with the algorithm and seeing if it would work?

I hope there's a second part showing it solving various levels

2:00 he CLEARLY watched RCE

My guy really said "if you didn't like the video, dislike it" you deserve my sub

As an architect who worked with engineers in an A/E firm for 20+ years, I love your dig at us starting at about the 1:55 mark. I had many engineer coworkers who I still call my friends -- a couple very good friends -- but professionally we drove each other crazy.

I like that this video demonstrated a safer example of the paperclip optimiser problem at the end. AI's goal isn't specific enough, so it does something ridiculous instead of what was intended. That could be stopping the ball from crossing the space instead of helping it to do so, or it could be consuming the entire galaxy to turn everything into paperclips...

When the AI discovers the physics of the game to cheat:

Having a maximum penalty for lost balls is an effective improvement; it shouldn't be (much) worse than a ball that hasn't moved at all. As the evaluation function is already composite (anchors, ball distance...), I'd also consider a non-linear evaluation on the ball distance. Closer to the finish should be very important and perhaps the distance should be rated exponentially. Another thing that could be interesting is average velocity of the ball; lower average velocity means smoother bridge. I would love to see a followup with improvements on the evaluation (perhaps my suggestions :))

Cool! And it's a great foundation to build on. Would you try to improve the model with more realistic criteria? 1. Two-way crossing so that the solution can be symmetrical. 2. Vibration measurement, its minimization... 3. And anything else I didn't think of.

@AstroSamDev

9 ай бұрын

I think I just may in a future video. Thanks for watching!

I would love to see sequel for the vid.

How long did it take you to write the code? Could you also use an adaptive large neighborhood search?

reading the comments and just reminded me of the swinging bridge and throw result. a nice simple way to overcome that would be to have 2 balls one after the other test the same bridge like traffic.

There already is a fixed update function in unity for doing physics calculations

Interesting timing. I just made a genetic algorithm library in Go and am in te process of optimizing its performance.

I once heard that an algorithm had been designed to assist in choosing the most efficient route for a road across London. When the program was tested, it came up with an answer in less time than expected - straight down the river.

Change the reword function such that time to cross is a factor so that by failing to complete in a timely manner it greatly impedes the reward. Time to cross over cost maybe?

I imagine it'd be very fun to see the algorithm that got the car to the end goal in the slowest way possible

MY MAN! I saw you just a while ago making videos getting less than 1000 views WTF HAPPENED? you blew tf up congrats! I hope you have the best game dev journy ever!

Use a checkpoint system for reward at crossing every point on the bridge, instead of end result only, maybe that will determine the AI to solve the crossing the bridge problem and build an actual bridge.

damn this dude is insane😮

@anomalousanimates

10 ай бұрын

bro really went 😮

I expected a super barebones explanation of how it worked, but I think I know a little bit more about machine learning now as a non-coding layman. great stuff

Very cool. I’ve been thinking about doing something like this but haven’t had the time or energy to put into it

Would be awesome if you made a follow up video improving it to set records in game

There is also Bridge Constructor series. I played Portal, and it was fun

I have never seen you before but i should be taking notes You’re the only programmer on yt that i know of that Shows what they’re doing

@Onaterdem

10 ай бұрын

Sebastian Lague

When creating fitness functions, I’ll often find multiple ways to score it, such as, for example: ‘distance traveled exceeds 5 units’ and ‘minimum distance to goal’ Scoring perfect gets you one point for each. 1 point for a minimum distance of 0, 1 point for traveling 5 units. I’ll then take all these disparate fitness scores and multiply them together for the final fitness score for the bridge. so if the ball never leaves the start (0 points for 0 of 5 units moved) and the ball never gets closer to the goal (0 points for goal proximity) - 0 * 0 = 0… which fair, bad example. the point is, any single fitness function doing poorly penalizes the overall score, and none of these functions need to ‘pass’ before other functions start getting considered. There’s some finagling to do (what if all functions start scoring at zero?) … but the point is, don’t limit yourself to just a linear score. Powers, logs, priorities use what works for you.

You have to use double precision fitness values or you get stuck in local minima.

@AstroSamDev

9 ай бұрын

I thought I was, but because it is all behind the scenes in a class I don't often edit and see that. Now that I look, I see that it is a double type, but I think when I add to it and set it from the Agent's class it is as a float. So I will fix this in a future revision

Mans like "I don't got time to play" but has time to remake the entire game

"as long as the bridge doesn't fall down and cars don't crash you will be paid" engineers: "ChatGPT, design me a 4 lane, 423 meter long bridge east to west..."

It would be interesting to see what happens if you take some of the more successful bridges and recreate them in Poly Bridge.

hopnestly I thought we were going to see some amazing designs, but we got amazing TLDR's!

This is pretty interesting and I think that if you make a few adjustments you could make a really cheap bridge for some levels in poly bridge and I would love to see that

I was hoping for another step of adjustments to refine the reward system after you brought it up as an issue but was kinda left hanging like the bridge supports made of wood. 😂 I think (as someone glancing in from the outside) an issue was that your setup wasn't really rewarding the system for using supports in any constructive ways. If you come back to this at all, I personally would like to see refinement of the reward system to encourage more connectivity with supports back onto the road structure, and also to refrain from using road material outside of the direct path. Those are obviously just my thoughts, and either way, love the content.

The genetic algorithm should be choosing which ones survive differently, each ai makes a bridge, then they have to walk across their bridge's 100 times with the simulation wearing down pieces over time, any of them that fall die, the other ones move on. If they all die repopulate it with another 100 random ais.

Ahh yes, immediately figures out dangling roads. It’s already a true Polybridge player

Really liked the more code based style of this video! Got one question tho could you slide me that vs theme name?

@AstroSamDev

9 ай бұрын

Thank you! The theme is called Monokai++, an extension for VSCode, and I made a port of it to Visual Studio which you can find here: github.com/sam-astro/monokai-plus-plus

@reniaz

9 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev Thank you very much!

I was lowkey expecting you to recreate one of the result bridges in the original game

2:41 Looking up at the sun in minecraft be like:

never expected a cool poly bridge video, it's amazing

So i'm sure you already thought of this, but I think the AI would have a better chance if piece placement was changed to emulate the Arc tool. Like if the distance between two points it chooses is greater than material.maxLength, add a third point halfway between the two and offset it by a random number * the line's normal (weighted toward 0 offset) to define an arc, then create floor(arcLength/material.maxLength) connections and equally space them along the curve. It would probably still be a mess, but it would likely get it closer faster and is closer to how real players think when they plan a bridge.

I'd be curious to see if any of the designs would work in the actual game

"I dont have enough time to play the game so il make a new version of it from scratch"

as they say, "be careful what you wish for"

"It isn't the solution we wanted" I instantly thought "It is the solution you deserved." :)

a follow up video on this but it minimized stress would be really interesting

"Clearly it was built by engineers, to break it you would need an architect" 💀💀

So many questions: 1. Why not specify in fitness function, that "car" should cross the bridge? 2. Where 3d red connection point come from at the bottom? 3. Why not use gravity and shape for the "car"? 4. Why not use probability function, bases on fitness to decide parents? 5. How many spicies do you create per generation?

You should make a video about the dynamic bridges, would like to see more

is there a way to inject the Neural Network controls directly into the game? could even reach out to the devs and see if they can make a special build of Poly Bridge 3 that allows for injection?

@eduardokerber2931

9 ай бұрын

without reverse engineering the game, the easiest way i can think off is tracking the image of the game while played for the simulation part, for the building it think his code may be able to be adapted to work, biggest problem is the amount of time it would take to train it on a single instance running at a time

3:37 doesn't Unity have a built in update function that *does* run at a fixed rate? Was there a specific reason that you didn't use FixedUpdate()?

What if you tweaked it to measure the total distance each part of the bridge moved during the simulation, and the less the bridge moved give it a higher score / the more the bridge moved the lower the score? Could also have it on some iterations remove a random non-road part to the bridge and if the score doesn't decrease massively, continue from there. Try to remove some of the additional clumps.

Ooh just tought it would be really cool if the AstroSam logo closes at the end instead of fading out It would close exactly in the same way that it opened at the beginning

While watching Matt(@RealCivilEngineerGaming) tweaking his bridges I thought I'd be cool to replace Matt with genetic algorithm. I don't even thing neural network is required for that. Basically we can give the bridge (with suboptimal but working design) to the computer and ask it to move joints around until it'd land on the cheapest possible bridge without structural modification. That would drastically speed up the search (compared to generating the bridge from scratch) and hopefully show what the design actually is capable of. And implementing it as a mod/plugin for the original game would be absolutely cool but i have no idea how hard would it be to integrate such thing into the game.

2:48 "new Vector4" I didnt even know Unity had that lol

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

Great for when you are making 4D games, as we all do.

@soundzythedev

10 ай бұрын

@@AstroSamDev I should have been doing this from the start! I have been using 2 separate vector2s instead!!!

Would be really cool if someone did this but hooked into the actual game and used that to simulate everything. Seems like it may be easier than reimplementing them too

@daefin9993

10 ай бұрын

that would get you banned

@pacomatic9833

10 ай бұрын

​@@daefin9993But they wont be used ng online anyways.

@mloxard

9 ай бұрын

​@daefin9993 you can literally pirate the game

@daefin9993

9 ай бұрын

@@mloxard hadnt thought of that but piracy is illegal and modifying a multiplayer game is against most tos's

I wondered where my boing ball went.

This is like a mix of code bullet and real civil engineer😂😂 you got a new sub

I hope the poly bridge devs see this and give you a chance to actually test an AI in the real game!

Do you only have 2 members in your population? It looked like every bridge throughout the entire training was just a slight variation on the previous one. You really need a large population to explore a large amount of different designs, and a mutation bias high enough that a clearly bad design doesn't stick around for hundreds of generations.

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

The population size was 100, and I think the mutation chance was about 10-20 percent

Oh, thought you were gonna elaborate on the cheating thing and maybe do something about it but alright.

You know that there is a thing in unity called FixedUpdate(){} right? so your elapse function is useless

@AstroSamDev

10 ай бұрын

no

@SplitFace4393

10 ай бұрын

​​​@@AstroSamDevand you can also set after how much ms it's called, default is 33ms so every frame on 60fps

I liked this video! I'm reminded of way back when, I wrote a sudoku solver program. It was a big time saver, but it kind of killed my desire to ever play sudoku by hand again...

Your fitness function could have been based on three things: the changes to the road pieces (max distance change, max angle change) and the max distance change of the balls. Also you should have randomized ball size. With keeping the ball as level as possible the main goal. This will help avoid jumps, hills, swings, and dips. If you’re given a straight path of road joints and told to keep it as level as possibly by only adding bridge connections etc.

The AI got very close to a very real bridge design. The jumbled wood members and some of the legths were the problem but overall you can actually make a bridge with a single column and just a few supporitng struts.

one thing interesting in this video. the difficult way to produce effective reward function, because it's the key to evaluate/reward/select evolution.

3:50 you know that FixedUpdate exist

Kinda wanted to see the final bridge in polybridge. D: Oh well. Lol

I always find it funny how some solutions turn out when working with neural networks to solve problems ^^ It again and again shows that we need to be very sure about the ruleset we give an AI before we let it run wild as it will find loopholes in the blink of an eye.

Are there any games that have AI agents trained like this? I was thinking of adding predator / prey entities into my game and have the predator rewarded by enemies eaten, and the prey rewarded by time survived

OH DAMM, FINALLY, A NEW ASTRO SAM VIDEO!!!