As this is powered by an LLM, you are exploring its latent space. That means there isn't one logic behind everything - any association is fair game. Here, probably the strongest one wins.
The rewilding guys would probably say 'that tracks'. Many of their efforts to get rivers to flow year round usually involve trees. Moss, bugs, rodents and grasses first then trees. Usually can help many areas to have year round streams again. As roots help water linger longer in an area. Which leads to streams.
Obviously the prompt to the LLM is just to create the most obvious association. It may not mention "crafting" at all. Maybe it does though. Is there something obvious to craft that uses a tree and water in the process?
To design a game like this you need to do a lot better than just creating the obvious association. It needs a mix of obvious recipes and clever recipes, so that there's challenge and a sense of achievement. Also, there's a starting point. What should the graph look like?
I'm sure Neal has done hard work in getting it right.
Meh, what would be your great response to Tree + Water?
A human can only generate a small fraction of the combinations and would have a hard time coming up with most combinations which are already nonsensical.
What is your non-disappointing idea for, idk, Tears + Pottery (AI: Bowl) or Money + Salt Lick (AI: Cow) or Skull + Lake (AI: Loch Ness) or Dracula + Pirate (AI: Vampirate) or Curse + Money (AI: Debt)? Now do that thousands of more times.
The infinite aspect is the thing that keeps it interesting, I think. The fun is getting a new, weird result like "Dracula" and "Pot of Gold" and seeing if you can generate new weird results from the existing set.
Porkosaurus, Soup Nazi, Sphinxie, Sodium Chloride, Abdominable Snowman, Baconator and both Yeti and Godzilla. And Yogazilla which is a "First Discovery".
How did you get to fish? Because boy do I have a story for you.
Mine starts in Atlantis, then Poseidon gives me a fish. Then two fish turned into a shark and I ended up with a sharknado.
Then I found the titanic, we hit an iceberg, I found a treasure and then pirates chased me, but I got away, sold the treasure for money and became the richest man, then climbed Mt Everest, and later had a tea party.
Anyway, there has to be a better way to get fish than Unda da Sea.
I've also got a few where it just mashes adjectives together; so far I've found Time Poseidon, Rainbow Steam Robocloud and Broken Unicorn, among other similar ones.
I think it’s the first time AI has made me chuckle. I ended up with “Riddle”, so I combined that with “Tornado” and it gave me “Twister” which I thought was a great Christmas Cracker pun, and then when I combined Riddle with “Bottle” it gave me “Genie”.
Here’s all the combinations I’ve came up with so far:
Swamp + Mud = Quagmire
Divorce + God = Odd
Sun + Hourglass = Time
Glass + Hourglass = Time
Ice + Oasis = Penguin
Sand + Stone = Pyramid
Mirage + Time = Illusion
Dinosaur + Lightning = Godzilla
Oasis + Water = Mirage
Egg + Time = chicken
Golem + tide = Titan
Titan + time = Chronos
Poseidon + lighting = Zeus
Titan + Chronos = Cronus
Time + Fire = Sun
Sun * Titan = Apollo
Ash + Mud = Clay
Godzilla + Love = God
? + ? = Spongebob
Unicorn+Gold=Alchemy
Unicorn+Alchemy = Philosopher’s Stone
Gold+Alchemy=Midas
swamp+chicken=duck
duck+roast=goose
goose+goose=flock
flock+wind=flight
Narwhal+time=unicorn
Lightning + Treasure = lots of stuff (Rich, idk
Narwhal+unicorn=narwhalicorn
Jonah+time=narwhal
Whale+oasis=jonah
Plant+seed=tree
noah+ark=flood
curse+jesus=cross
bank+intrest=money
dandelion+cactus=desert
Back to the future+riddle=time travel
back to the future+time=delorian
Desert+indiana jones=tresure
