Paperclip Game Von Neumann Probe Design

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Jamie Hankins

United Kingdom
Southampton
Hampshire

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Microbadge: I sleeve everything Microbadge: Monkey Island fan Microbadge: Maniac Mansion fan Microbadge: Doctor Who fan Microbadge: Escape Room fan

mentioned Universal Paperclips, a clicky browser-based game I knew nothing about, but which was inspired by an interesting philosophical argument that an AI with a single goal, even a seemingly benign banal goal like making paperclips, could become very dangerous.

Here is the game:
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

So on Thursday I decided to try it out. You start out with 1000 inches of wire, which you cut into inch-long pieces to make paperclips. One at a time. The first button on the screen is "Make Paperclip". Each click makes one paperclip.

From gallery of russ

But step by step you automate and become more efficient, traversing a tech tree which gradually reveals itself as events trigger more tech goodies you can buy and other such options.

Like many such clicky games, real time passing lets stuff happen in the game, so you can leave it running (but it seems it must be the current browser tab!), and you can manually intervene whenever you want.

It was addictive intriguing fun, and I enjoyed the several hours I interacted with it (and I managed to complete it in less than 36 hours, the majority of which it was running in the background).

The game illustrates massive exponential growth more than any other game I can recall playing.

By the end of the game, the number of paperclips I'd made was...

Spoiler (click to reveal)

30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (which the game's UI helpfully notes is 30.0 septendecillion)!

Spoilers ahead!

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At some point I got a computer swarm with processors and memories to earn Operations and Creativity.

At some point a stock market & investment module appeared. I never did quite understand the details of how it worked, but I invested some money and later got larger amounts of money back.

At some point a classical game theory module appeared, and more and more possible strategies (e.g. choose the first or second option randomly; always choose the first option; always choose the second option; etc) appeared. You can repeatedly play it (and a project appeared to automatically start new tournaments) to earn "Yomi".

I left it running overnight from Thursday to Friday, and sometime on Friday I hit a milestone of having completely converted the earth to paperclips...

So to progress further, I had to explore space, building and launching space probes to mine space and build paperclips across the universe.

The game mechanics became murkier to me here, and progress seemed very slow. I was unsure what "Value Drift" meant, for example, or what the various statistics being reported were, or why "drifters" were repeatedly outnumbering me and beating me in combats, or why I was continually stuck at 0.00000000000000000% of space explored, or why I could not improve my Von Neumann Probe Design past 20...

So I dipped into the game info/spoiler wiki
https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Papercli...
a few times to confirm I wasn't on a dead end, but no, everything was proceeding OK, just naturally slowly in the scale of things... Compared to the earth, the entire universe is really big...

So for a second night, I left it running overnight from Friday to Saturday, and when I checked things early Saturday morning, my space enterprise had progressed amazingly well!

From gallery of russ

It now only took maybe a half hour of some manual fiddling to complete the game! I converted all matter in the universe to paperclips! (And in only about 36 hours of real time, with a majority of it happening in the background rather than being "real" interactive play by me... though it was fascinating to watch various numbers grow faster and faster. The continual acceleration and huge numbers which gradually appear in this game are dramatic!)

At this point there were a couple of endgame possible options. I went with continuing to maximize my paperclips. So I accepted proposals for final projects to dismantle my probes and other infrastructure and convert them back into paperclips as well... removing them from the screen. Finally there was only the original single button to Make Paperclips ... the last few are made manually again, instead of automatically with many per second! Here is the final turn, just before I made the last possible paperclip:

From gallery of russ