Black holes, buildings on poles, and a ‘sea urchin planet’: PUBG creator’s world-sized tech demo may be hiding some bizarre machine learning ‘hallucinations’ [Video]

I’ve just set foot for the first time on PUBG creator Brendan Greene’s new planet, and I’ve gotta say: it definitely looks like a planet. I see some rocks. I see a few trees. One day I walked around in a forest, the next, a desert. I see gentle hills and scattered boulders and a sun in the sky, but nothing out of the ordinary. At least not yet.

This is Preface: Undiscovered World, a tech demo from PlayerUnknown Productions, that uses Melba, Greene’s new game engine, to create an “Earth-scale world” using “machine learning agents.” Preface is the first step in what Greene estimates could be a “five or 10 year journey” to create a massively multiplayer sandbox the size of a planet (and perhaps the metaverse, maybe).

While all these rocks and trees and hills appear to be perfectly sensible and normal, this planet-sized planet I’m trudging around on may be …