Item — HN Reader

"I think it can be taken further; rather than "spot the errors that ChatGPT made", you could flip the script and make it "survive 20 turns of conversation without making a historical error", so you'd need to know things like local traditions, perhaps the geography of the ancient settlement you're studying, contemporaneous history like "who is the emperor and what's the sentiment towards him" and so on."

Yes, exactly. This is where I've been heading with my planning for assignments. For instance, when confronting Ea-nāṣir about his poor quality copper, I'd want my students to actually show some knowledge of the geography and political dynamics of ancient Mesopotamia.

The "Fall of the Ming Dynasty" simulator I link to at the bottom of post is probably the most well developed example of this that I've come up with so far. In that one, I added a "political intrigue minigame" in which ChatGPT is supposed to assess the human player's ability to deploy rhetoric appropriate for a minor courtier in 1640s China (from the prompt: "success depends on your luck score + rhetorical skill, tested via a series of open-ended prompts that HistoryLens will assess and grade; only the highest scoring responses will allow you to succeed in the minigame.")

Here is the full prompt for that one if people want to try it: https://chat.openai.com/share/86815f4e-674c-4410-893c-4ae3f1...

3 comments

That’s great, courtroom drama sounds like an excellent angle.

I was thinking of “king hearing petitions” as another potentially interesting scenario; it could go either into minutia that requires cultural knowledge, or strategic stuff like the game Crusader Kings where you need to understand the geopolitical allegiances of the time, the geography, and the national economy.

More generally I have been wondering if games like “start a company in a simulated sandbox world” could actually teach transferrable Econ/Business/startup skills. There is a lot of territory to explore here.

What are your thoughts on this update? https://chat.openai.com/share/6178453a-4a8a-430a-ac13-156b54...

Basically, re-iterate the original instructions each time, describe last 2 moves in details, and provide brief summary of all the previous moves. Can have much longer games this way - maybe this deserves to be a python script.

I like it. Tried something similar early on, but decided it wasn't worth it because the ChatGPT context window is only enough to run for 10-20 turns anyway. But with Claude's 100k token context window, this should work great. Thank you.

I'm sure there are ways around this if you use the API and connect it to a MySQL database to allow users to "save" their spot... I'm not technical so my understanding of what's involved is hazy, but curious if people have ideas of how to do this simply. But for my current use case, I'm working with dozens/hundreds of college students so I need to make sure the whole thing is free. I've applied for a grant that could fund use of the API though, fingers crossed.

Perhaps a no-code UI might let you wire up the conversational memory being suggested here.

I haven’t used these but saw a post on them:

https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/flowise-for-langchain-b7c40...

https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/langflow-46563a8af323

> knowledge of the geography and political dynamics of ancient Mesopotamia

How much was the average ancient Mesopotamian aware of those things?

Likely very little. But a merchant capable of writing (or paying a scribe to write) a formal cuneiform complaint about bad copper, then having it delivered, would know quite a bit more. Great question IMO - thinking critically about exactly these kinds of questions is one of the goals of the assignment.