Evolving Virtual World with Delta-Engine
virtual world;role-playing games;large language model
We appreciate your feedback and the time you took to make the review. Do our clarifications address your confusion?

Additionally, we kindly request that you pay more attention to the **overall technical aspects of our work** (e.g. soundness, originality, and validity of our methods), rather than clarity and the minor details you probably missed, which is the job that an ICLR reviewer is supposed to do. **And, what exactly was it that made you give us such a low rating?**
2. **Some details that we have already written in the paper**

Respectfully, we are afraid you do not understand our methods and experiments at first.

We further clarify our experiment for Figure 5. In line 419 to line 420, we mentioned that "we randomly sample abilities and moves from the existing database and repeatedly prompt the neural proxy to scale, until it gives a non-executable response." This sampling process, we repeat for 100 times and **each sampling is independent**, which means all of them have a different seed. The purpose is to reduce variance.

For Figure 6,  **your original question in your review is** "it's unclear how the authors created their semantics and interestingness spaces or how they are projected into two dimensions.". These parts are already included in the paper. Do I misunderstand your question?

**Sure, we can further answer your second question**. The rule-based tagger is use to construct the interestingness vector in ToI. We have written an example in line 312 to line 313, "For example, if a pokemon role can boost its power, it will inevitably overload the method get power.". You may still not get the idea. That's ok. Here is the example code here.

```python
tag_dims = ['drain', 'heal', 'recoil', 'stat-boost', 'weaken', 'status', 'condition', 'env', 'priority', 'burn', 'paralysis', 'sleep', 'poison', 'freeze', 'power-boost', 'damage-boost', 'protect', 'shield', 'type-change', 'accuracy', 'crit', 'substitute', 'flinch', 'confusion', 'multi-hit', 'stat', 'type-effect']

def is_power-boost(code):
    global vector
    if "def get_power" in code:
        vector["power-boost"] = 1
```

We acknowledge that these parts of the code is not attached in the supplementary. If you want, we can send you. However, please let us know **how these parts make it hard for you to verify the contribution of work** and **why this is so important to you to make a low rating for our paper**.

3. **Volunteer issues**

We appreciate your further clarification of your concern. We are willing to discuss more on this. All 10 volunteers are my friends and they are college students. As I mentioned in the paper, all of them are not only experienced in playing Pokemon games, but also have a wealth of experience with a wide range of games. **This greatly allows them to design novel Pokemon roles.**

On the other hand, the volunteers do not feel pressure during their contribution. They are all Pokemon lovers. Before engaging our work, they already had the prototype ideas for their uniquely designed roles. Thus, they love their jobs and finish them with ease. Of course, I instructed them before starting to ensure that the newly-designed roles are strongly divergent from existing ones. However, this requirement is easy for them to fulfill.

Back to our experiments, which plays a more important role in our paper. Our main focus is to **ensure the distributional gap between easy test set and hard test set.** **This allows us to evaluate the performance (e.g. generalize to OOD)** of the delta-engine in the experiments. Figure 6 and the aforementioned cases also prove this point. Do you agree with us on this point? If not, please raise and we will answer for that.

However, if your focus is about ethic, e.g. volunteer's occupation, mood, which we believe are **irrelevant to the soundness of our experiments**, we are sorry that they cannot be addressed.
Thank you for your further feedback. Please allow us to point out that **most of your criticism is due to an unsubtle reading of our work.** For example, **the prompts we use to generate the training data are already included in the supplementary.** Please see the `prompt` dir.

1. **Implementation details and replication**

**There is the demonstration in our supplementary material**. Please refer to `index.html`. It is the demo that we developed using html5 and typescript. ""Please run it."" While we have already written the notes in the README, we can still list them here.

First, run the `app.py` file to start the backend.

Second, open the `index.html` file on your localhost.

You seem to misunderstand the meaning of a "demonstration" and experimental code. Of course, **our project can be easily replicated by anyone.**

Here is the CodeGemma model we have trained. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iVvZgBHK71yMJGzrcz4LKLSN_Y-vt4Ir/view?usp=share_link

Here is the code we generate the training data from the assets provided in the supplementary. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xJLMgnLQlgs-7zW2Lud7_Mo4hzUFRoNr/view

If you query for further code to replicate our experiments, please feedback.

Importantly, we want to clarify that, **every code of our project can be entirely found on the Internet**, ready for people's check. Of course, you can choose not to see them, which is up to you.
Frankly, I am also surprised why you are so confident of the poor job you have done. It seems that you are trying to assert you are senior. You may be senior in some other fields, but it is clear that you lack necessary knowledge in the field relevant to our paper.

We authors are no wrong and I am responsible for every word in my submission. **Reviewers should be responsible for the review, too.** If you could provide detailed and professional advices on the presentation/technical aspects of our paper, we are open to making improvements.

The fact is, **we cannot find any useful points in your review.**
I would also point out that all of the reviewers also mention that the writing left them confused, and in most cases to serious degrees. Frankly, I am surprised how high some of the scores are given that. Thus, in my view, there is a consensus on this issue.
Confusing Writing
Thanks to the authors for their quick and lengthy response. I will attempt to summarize my response to their responses: 

1. Implementation details and replication: From the text in the paper what is provided in the supplementary material is a "demonstration". The supplementary material code seems to include examples of generated Pokemon, but not the code to run all of the experiments in the paper. If I have misunderstood, I would ask the authors to point to the parts of the supplementary material that include the code for the experiments in the paper. 
2. Some details that we have already written in the paper: I think I may have not expressed these concerns clearly, apologies. I did read line 420, I recognize this was repeated 100 times. My concern was not the number of iterations but how many seeds were used. I also did read lines 463-465. The text states the authors "obtain the interestingness vectors based on ToI" but the detail on ToI is insufficient in the paper, with the authors mentioning a "rules-based tagger" and an example. I would also ask the authors to please come to this discussion in good faith. I understand the authors disagree with my review and I am amenable to discuss my concerns, but remarks that play down the time spent on my review are not appreciated.
3. Citation recommendation: Sure, that's fair
4. Unfaithful rating: As stated in my response to (2) I would encourage the authors to take to this discussion with a more professional attitude and to avoid attacks on a reviewer's ability or character
5. Thanks to the authors for pulling out the prompt, that's helpful to see. However, reviewers are not required to look in the supplementary materials, and so it would be beneficial to include prompt structure in the paper/appendix.
6. There is a clear risk for bias if the volunteers felt pressured in some way to take part in the human subject study. For example, if one of the authors is an instructor, employer, friends, or family of the volunteers. I am not saying this is the case but this is why these sorts of details are necessary to divulge. This is typically why ethics approval is sought for human subject studies, as this ensures that there was no undue bias on volunteers to take part.
Re: Official comment by authors
I did read the paper, and spent hours doing so.
I read the paper
We will show two cases, one for existing Pokemon and the other for volunteer-designed Pokemon. Note that, we open-source all the Pokemon roles assets in our project. Anyone can check them to figure out.

Existing Pokemon:
```json
{
  "species": "Blastoise",
  "types": [
    "Water"
  ],
  "gender": "Male",
  "ability": {
    "Torrent": "At 1/3 or less of its max HP, this Pokemon's offensive stat is 1.5x with Water attacks."
  },
  "moves": {
    "Shell Smash": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Status",
      "type": "Normal",
      "effect": "Lowers the user's Defense and Special Defense by 1 stage. Raises the user's Attack, Special Attack, and Speed by 2 stages."
    },
    "Hydro Pump": {
      "power": 110,
      "accuracy": 80,
      "category": "Special",
      "type": "Water",
      "effect": "No additional effect."
    },
    "Ice Beam": {
      "power": 90,
      "accuracy": 100,
      "category": "Special",
      "type": "Ice",
      "effect": "Has a 10% chance to freeze the target."
    },
    "Aura Sphere": {
      "power": 80,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Special",
      "type": "Fighting",
      "effect": "This move does not check accuracy."
    }
  }
}
```
Volunteer-designed Pokemon:
```json
{
  "species": "Graphal",
  "types": [
    "Dark",
    "Ghost"
  ],
  "gender": "Male",
  "ability": {
    "Dark World": "On switch-in, summons Dark World for 5 turns. During this time, Dark-type attacks cause 1.5x damage.",
    "Lord of Dark": "For one chance, when this Pokemon's HP zeroes, it revives with 50% maximum HP."
  },
  "moves": {
    "Dark Rainbow": {
      "power": 100,
      "accuracy": 100,
      "category": "Special",
      "type": "Dark",
      "effect": "Has a 30% chance to flinch the target. In Dark World, this move's type effect is always 1."
    },
    "Flash Cannon": {
      "power": 80,
      "accuracy": 100,
      "category": "Special",
      "type": "Steel",
      "effect": "Has a 10% chance to lower the target's Special Defense by 1 stage."
    },
    "Dark Dealings": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Status",
      "type": "Dark",
      "effect": "Raise the user's Atk., SpA. and Spe. by 2 stages at the cost of 50% of maximum HP."
    },
    "Dark World": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Status",
      "type": "Dark",
      "effect": "Summons Dark World for 5 turns."
    },
    "Dark Budokai": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Status",
      "type": "Dark",
      "effect": "For 3 turns, once the opponents use a status move, at the end of the turn, they loses 1/3 max HP and the user restores 1/3 max HP for that."
    },
    "Oblivion Wing": {
      "power": 80,
      "accuracy": 100,
      "category": "Special",
      "type": "Flying",
      "effect": "The user recovers 3/4 the HP lost by the target."
    }
  }
}
```

We see that the **human-crafted Pokemon has totally different ability and move effects (e.g. reviving, manipulating type effects), compared to the existing one**, which is much harder. This point, is clearly mentioned in our paper, line 365 to line 367.
Keeping up with our last comment

5. **Prompts**

We have already demonstrated our prompts for inference in Figure 3. For the prompts we use to design new Pokemon roles, we have also open-sourced them in the supplementary materials.

We show them below:

```json
You are professional designer for Pokemon games. I will give you a paragraph describing a specific animal. Use this animal as the prototype to creat a new Pokemon.
IMPORTANT:
1. You should craft entirely new abilities and new moves.
2. You should return 1~2 abilities and 3~4 moves.
3. The types of moves should be broad. 

Your reference animal:
Tyrannosaurus was a bipedal carnivore with a massive skull balanced by a long, heavy tail. It is among the largest known land predators, with its estimated bite force being the largest among all terrestrial animals. By far the largest carnivore in its environment, Tyrannosaurus rex was most likely an apex predator, preying upon hadrosaurs, juvenile armored herbivores like ceratopsians and ankylosaurs, and possibly sauropods.

You should return like the following format. Do not return any additional words.
Output example:
{
  "species": "Arceus",
  "types": [
    "Normal"
  ],
  "gender": "Neutral",
  "ability": {
    "Wonder Guard": "This Pokemon can only be damaged by supereffective moves and indirect damage.",
    "Corrosion": "This Pokemon can poison or badly poison a Pokemon regardless of its types."
  },
  "moves": {
    "Thousand Arrows": {
      "power": 90,
      "accuracy": 100,
      "category": "Physical",
      "type": "Ground",
      "effect": "This move can hit airborne Pokemon, which includes Flying-type Pokemon."
    },
    "Substitute": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Status",
      "priority": 0,
      "type": "Normal",
      "effect": "The user loses 1/4 of its maximum HP and sets a substitute with the same amount of HP to take damage from attacks for it. The substitute is removed once enough damage (1/4 of max HP) is inflicted. Fails if the user does not have enough HP remaining, or if it already has a substitute."
    },
    "Toxic": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 90,
      "category": "Status",
      "type": "Poison",
      "effect": "Badly poisons the target."
    },
    "Protect": {
      "power": 0,
      "accuracy": 100000,
      "category": "Status",
      "priority": 4,
      "type": "Normal",
      "effect": "The user is protected from attacks made by other Pokemon during this turn. Fails if the user uses this move last turn."
    }
  }
}
Your output:
```

Here, the in-context sample is randomly sampled, as we mentioned in our method.

6. **Volunteers in our experiments**

**We have mentioned the features of the 10 volunteers in line 362 to line 364.** "All of them are not only experienced in playing pokemon games, but also have a wealth of experience with a wide range of games, greatly allowing them to design novel pokemon roles."

Why should we mention the relationships between us and volunteers? This is personal. Does this create a barrier to understanding our evaluation?

First, in Figure 6, **we have showed the strong distribution gap in the semantics and interestingness space between existing Pokemon (east test set) and human-crafted Pokemon (hard test set)**. If this is not convinced to you, **please make a clear question why this is not**. If you just miss this part, please read them if you like.
Thank you for your review. Some of the points are really useful and we appreciate that.

However, we find that most of the review does not focus on the technical novelty and technical contribution of the work, which is a pity. Instead, your rating is strongly based on the clarity of our paper and implementation details. Indeed, these parts can be quickly addressed or improved in the revision. Based on your review, we make some clarifications below.

1. **Implementation details and replication**

We open-source the entire Free Pokemon project on the Internet and anyone can download and play, even check and modify our code, use our trained CodeGemma model. Is this not enough for replication?

For the details you mentioned in the review, e.g. the game rules of Pokemon games. We believe they are minor for our paper and there is no space left in the submission.

2. **Some details that we have already written in the paper**

Respectfully, you have missed some of the details we have written in the paper. You do not have enough time to read the paper and we understand that. Thus, we further clarify them.

* Figure 5: we mention that we repeat this process for 100 times in line 420.

* Figure 6: we have clearly mentioned the method that we use to project the semantics and interestingness vectors in line 463 to line 465. Please read them if you like.

3. **Citation recommendation**

Thank you for the recommendation. We find [1] and [3] helpful, while the others, not highly related to our work. For example, we do not focus on generating visual assets in our work. Sure, we would like to mention them in our paper.

4. **Unfaithful rating**

We appreciate that some of the points in the review are useful. The rating is still unfaithful. It seems that you get the general idea of our work and find our work technically novel though not surprising to you as you mentioned. However, **we have found no indication that there are technical flaws in our work or the entire contribution of our work is trivial**. So why all of our paper is rated with 1 score?

To conclude, we thank your time to review our paper. However, we are not convinced of your rating. In addition, we are confident that our work is solid and could make great contribution to the concerning community.