Hi HN,

I wanted to share a side project from my work at UNSW that has recently become all-consuming!

Essentially, we built a new kind of CTF where players competed to dominate an in-house social media platform, set in a fictional country, with the goal of swinging a simulated election.

This was done to both raise awareness that such kinds of AI-powered campaigns are possible, as well as build a rich environment and dataset for red-team blue-team R&D in future.

So that we could tune every part of our system, we built everything from the ground up - including our own social network (based on early twitter), our own news websites (built with Jekyll), and our own multi-agent framework for simulating NPCs (built with too much spaghetti Python).

The whole game is multiplayer, so every player and team was competing against every other player and team interactively to try and sway the NPCs in their direction.

We had 277 students from 18 Universities across Australia sign up to play, and ended up with 42 teams on the scoreboard. Our final prizegiving event was yesterday, and the team from QUT - all freshmen/first years - took the win (of AU$5,000)!

Overall we had such a blast running the event, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Already we are helping Day of AI Australia produce their own open-source version of the game for high schools in Australia, and for future CTNs starting next year, possible collaborators from two overseas universities have reached out to discuss running a joint international event (really hoping we'd be able to do that).

The answer is to evolve out of the need for narrative, which is a holdover of folk science. It’s an evolutionary bottleneck, discard them.