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Marc Lanctot

@sharky6000.bsky.social

8.3K followers 410 following 1.5K posts

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, interested in multiagent reinforcement learning, game theory, games, and search/planning. Lover of Linux 🐧, coffee ☕, and retro gaming. Big fan of open-source. #gohabsgo 🇨🇦 For more info: https://linktr.ee/sharky6000

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

Hello all! 👋 🚨 New Preprint Alert! 🚨

Code World Models for General Game-Playing. ♟️🎲 ♣️♥️♠️♦️

I am pleased to announce our new paper, which provides an extremely sample-efficient way to create an agent that can perform well in multi-agent, partially-observed, symbolic environments!

🧵 1/N

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 1d

💯 yes, of course!

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

You don't regret a thing, and you've got this friend, you see who makes you feel, when you wanted more than you could steal, you'll arrest yourself, you'll wear a shield, you'll go out of your way to prove that you still.... 🎸🤘

Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

Haha yeah, it was an exciting game so I wanted to try my hand as summarizing the end.

For the Dr. Creep one: the soundtrack link is in the description of the longplay (start them at the same time). This one flows well despite crossing decades and many musical boundaries 😅

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

For me most of it was discovered through friends or at gatherings.

deadmau5 is the notable exception. I saw two CDs on sale at store (CDs were on their way out already); I had heard his name a lot so I figured why not, popped them in the car... was a fan not 20 minutes later... 😄

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

Then stuff got really busy and I picked up some deadmau5 only around 2010 because I needed something new and have been into it since.

Discovered the Pixies in 2019 and listened to their first three albums almost on continuous repeat for three years.. 😅

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

Then I really got into post-rock revival once it hit (The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives) and only recently LCD Soundsystem after seeing Meet Me in the Bathroom.

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

Late 90's I really could not get into the rock of that time (Limp Bizkit etc.) so I went techno / electronica (Fatboy Slim was my gateway into this world). Coincidentally Radiohead also got more electronic with Kid A.

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

My first albums were Metallica - Black Album, G'n'R Use Your Illusion, Nirvana Nevermind, and RHCP Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

At first I listed to a lot of Metallica & Megadeth etc. but then went more alternative (Green Day, NiN, Incubus, Radiohead, early Foo Fighters).

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Reposted by Marc Lanctot

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 2d

Lot of people should read this exhaustive list of life improvements from the 90s: gwern.net/improvement

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

gwern.net

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

"20XX is the year of the Linux Desktop" 🤣

Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

BTW have you checked out my longplay of Dr. Creep Lovecraft? www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHw1...

Play it with the soundtrack. It is quite gloomy.. Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath, Radiohead (and some 80's pop! 😅).. but it works! The last ~13 min is two "hopeful" (to finally escape!) deadmau5 songs.. 🌄

Castles of Dr. Creep - Lovecraft Longplay

YouTube video by Marc Lanctot

www.youtube.com

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 2d

Haha yeah, different life phases. I started with metal / alternative and moved to techno / EDM turn of the century but still like all of it :)

Are you looking for only later than 2013?

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 4d

Omg totally agree.. in 2019 it recommended me "Gouge Away" from Pixies Doolittle and it was like I discovered hidden treasure. Lol.. I must have listened to Doolittle 100 times on repeat, some workdays it'd be like 3-4 times haha, then dud the same for Surfer Rosa and Bossanova

Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 4d

Wait, Knife Party??

I am only discovering them now (thanks to @sacha2.bsky.social) and I jumped straight from Inertia to Hold Your Colour.

So, assume I know nothing! 😅

Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 4d

We're going to rock civilization" 🤘🪘🎶

-- Pendulum : Prelude. First song on their album "Hold Your Color" (2005), which then immediately proceeds to Slam (below)....

What an opening! You have to listen to this song... 👇👇👇 it's the perfect gateway to the weekend 🤩

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Hn...

Slam

YouTube video by Pendulum - Topic

www.youtube.com

Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 4d

"Somewhere out there in the vast nothingness of space
Somewhere faraway in space and time
Staring upward at the gleaming stars in the obsidian sky
We're marooned on a small island
In an endless sea
Confined to a tiny spit of sand
Unable to escape...
But tonight
On this small planet, on earth....

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

Yup, I read it in February. Great book, lots of awesome color pics, learned a few things! 👍

Was cool to get a first hand account of the social events around some of the fan art and games of those days.

I only caught the tail end of computer shows in the early 90's and they were pretty cool.

Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

Argghhh the asterisk on Daniel's name got dropped.

Co-first authors are Wolf, Daniel, and Miguel. Apologies!

Reposted by Marc Lanctot

Dylski @2ne1.com · 7d

What happens when a pioneering artist hands creative control to an AI?

Announcing "Evolution and Foundation," a new London exhibition where Google's Gemini acts as the artist, directing the evolution of complex 3D art.

🗓️ Oct 17-26, 2025
📍 Oxo Gallery, London (@oxotowerwharf)

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

With special thanks to @sirbayes.bsky.social for this excellent summary thread of our work! 👍

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

Joint work with:

Wolfgang Lehrach*, Daniel Hennes, Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla*, Xinghua Lou, Carter Wendelken, @lizun.bsky.social, Antoine Dedieu, Jordi Grau-Moya, Atil Iscen, John Schultz, Marcus Chiam, @drimgemp.bsky.social, Piotr Zielinski, @satindersingh.bsky.social, @sirbayes.bsky.social 22/N

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

For more details (including how to train an RNN-based policy using PPO inside the "imagination" of the learned CWM), please see our paper:

arxiv.org/abs/2510.04542

21/N

Code World Models for General Game Playing

Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning abilities are increasingly being applied to classical board and card games, but the dominant approach -- involving prompting for direct move generation -- has si...

arxiv.org

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

We even match the performance of MCTS using the ground truth world model on 4 out of 5 of the games (the exception being backgammon). Imperfect information games are harder to learn, and performance is not as good, but we still beat the common LLM-as-policy approach. 20/N

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

We see that we beat Gemini 2.5 on 4 of the 5 games, and tie it in the case of tic-tac-toe. (Interestingly, Gemini 2.5 often does not even play legal moves, and hence loses by forfeit, even for existing (non-novel) games such as Backgammon which are part of its training set.) 19/N

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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 5d

Below we evaluate our method (in the perfect information setting) when playing against 3 different kinds of opponents: Gemini 2.5 Pro as a policy (using the same data as our method), MCTS with the ground truth world model (an upper bound), and a random policy (a lower bound). 18/N

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