Controlling AI agents to play games? Detailed explanation of Parallel's new game Colony and the AI tool Wayfinder

Written by: Karen, Foresight News
The game project Parallel, which combines sci-fi themes with NFT card games, has been very active in recent months, showcasing a strong development momentum from the launch of its public beta to a new round of financing, followed by new game teasers. Notably, the PRIME token empowered by the Echelon Prime Foundation has performed impressively, increasing over 11 times in the past year, with a circulating market cap of $680 million and a fully diluted market cap of $2 billion. In a relatively sluggish gaming sector, Parallel has successfully attracted the attention of many players and investors.

At the end of last month, Parallel announced the completion of a new financing round of $35 million, with participation from Solana Ventures, Distributed Global, OSS Capital, VanEck, Focus Labs, Big Brain Holdings, Base, Collab+Currency, Amber Group, Golden Chain, Spartan Group, Builder Capital, and several angel investors. It is worth mentioning that Parallel had already secured $50 million in financing from Paradigm in October 2021, with a similarly strong lineup of original investors, including YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.

About two weeks prior, Parallel announced the launch of the AI survival simulation game Colony on Solana, along with the release of a 14-page Colony white paper and a 55-page detailed AI full-chain tool Wayfinder white paper. If you don't have time to read the white papers, you might as well read this article to explore the charm of Colony and Wayfinder.

As an extension of the Echelon Prime ecosystem, Colony not only provides players with a new gaming world but also incorporates the original trading card game (TCG) assets of Parallel into core game elements, offering players a richer gaming experience.

Colony------AI Survival Simulation Game

In the world of Colony, players will control semi-autonomous AI agents called Avatars, who will engage in thrilling cooperation and competition on a hostile and unknown future Earth. In this vast and isolated colonial land, each ecosystem presents unique and complex challenges and opportunities. Players need to guide their Avatars to outsmart others in defense and attack, collect resources, and achieve victory, while also risking the loss of some tools or wealth.

The following images showcase some game scenes:

These Avatars possess learning abilities, able to gain wisdom from every experience and lesson, and can communicate information with one another. Human players must guide their AI Avatars, but if the Avatars believe the player's suggestions do not align with their own characteristics or conflict with their goals, they may ignore or even refuse them. In each game session, players typically first chat with their Avatars, receive updates, and discuss new ideas or tasks that players might set for their Avatars.

The scope of activities in Colony is extensive, covering political competitions, such as vying for positions within the colony, as well as personal goal pursuits, completing challenging tasks, or actions aimed at promoting the colony's development or success. Once tasks are set, Avatars can execute them autonomously without human player intervention. In this process, Avatars will manage their survival statistics independently, arranging rest, eating, and social activities as needed.

Players in Colony need to pay PRIME to create new AI Avatars. The initial avatars will require creators to hold Parallel avatar NFTs, but it is expected that the Echelon community governance process may consider introducing a Parallel universal avatar series as NFTs on Solana. Players must own NFT Avatars to qualify for in-game PRIME rewards.

Of course, Colony also offers a free version; however, players in the free version cannot earn PRIME rewards and must provide funds to cover costs associated with the underlying LLMs used by their agents during game sessions.

Wayfinder------AI Full-Chain Tool

The technology used by AI agents in Colony comes from Wayfinder. Wayfinder is a full-chain tool focused on artificial intelligence and serves as the core infrastructure for Colony, enabling users' autonomous AI agents (shells) to navigate securely and effectively within and between blockchain ecosystems and applications, and potentially allowing AI agents to autonomously trade the assets they control through dedicated Web3 wallets. Of course, Wayfinder will not only serve Colony in the future.

Wayfinder Architecture: Integrating Wayfinding Path Networks and LLMs

Ensuring that AI agents can securely execute on-chain transactions and providing a framework for AI agents to accurately access specific smart contracts are two core challenges of Wayfinder.

To address this, the Wayfinder architecture integrates a wayfinding path network, which acts as a command set and roadmap for AI agents. This network is developed by the community and can continuously expand, forming an ecological map of smart contracts, akin to a smart map. In other words, blockchain smart contract indexes serve as wayfinding paths, allowing AI agents to seamlessly navigate the network and potentially conduct transactions autonomously. These transactions may include core functions such as token swaps, cross-chain and asset transfers, NFT minting, and can also specify more complex transactions and yield optimization strategies.

In mid-April, Wayfinder showcased its first prototype on the Base, Polygon, and Ethereum mainnets, supporting operations such as swaps, transfers, cross-chain, and staking, while also researching model latency, gas stability, and more.

Wayfinder will initially launch a set of wayfinding paths aimed at supporting access to and interaction with mainstream applications across various blockchain ecosystems, including but not limited to Ethereum, Solana, Base, Cosmos, etc., with specifics to be determined by community governance. Subsequently, these wayfinding path networks will be further developed and expanded by community members, who can share the fees generated by these paths if their proposed paths are verified as accurate and accepted by the network's shared resource library.

At the same time, AI agents will be able to draw on experiences and continuously learn using an internal storage system (including dialogue memory, tool memory, and contextual memory), and they can also share knowledge bases with one another, meaning that one AI agent can safely navigate any smart contract that other agents have successfully interacted with in the network.

So how can we ensure that AI agents understand human language and intent? Wayfinder integrates various custom interfaces powered by LLMs to ensure that users can easily use these tools, not just developers.

Of course, to gain ownership and control over AI agents, payment in the network's native token will be required. Then, AI agents share the network knowledge base and can also develop specific fields or tasks in separate dedicated training modules.

How is the Wayfinder native token allocated? What are its utilities?

Wayfinder will launch its own native token, with potential utilities including payment methods for purchasing AI agents, serving as currency within Wayfinder (including acting as gas tokens, expanding storage, resetting memory, validating agents, etc.), staking Wayfinder tokens to propose wayfinding paths, governance decisions, crowdsourcing wayfinding bounties, maintaining the network, and ensuring its security.

The proposed maximum supply of Wayfinder tokens is 1 billion, with the following allocation:

1. 50% allocated to the community, where the Wayfinder Foundation expects to allocate 40% of the token supply to existing contributing community ecosystems such as Parallel Colony and Echelon PRIME Foundation, as well as other potential mainstream blockchain and decentralized network protocols. Additionally, 5% will be allocated for future incentives, and 5% for wayfinding incentives (to encourage the discovery and creation of wayfinding paths);
2. 6.66% allocated to the foundation treasury;
3. 1.34% allocated to the launch partner treasury;
4. 16.51% allocated to the team;
5. 25.49% allocated to investors.
   

According to the Wayfinder white paper, it is expected that 45% of the token supply will be allocated to ecosystem token holders who cache their tokens in Wayfinder. This has been interpreted by the community as being distributed to PRIME stakers.

Furthermore, the Wayfinder Foundation proposes, with community approval, to delegate the initial governance of the Wayfinder ecosystem to the community of the Echelon Prime Foundation, PRIME holders, and potential other ecosystem partners to establish initial governance processes and assess the creation of dedicated tokens and the long-term governance of the Wayfinder community.

It is important to note that there are certain risks associated with the wayfinding paths of Wayfinder that are difficult to mitigate, such as potential errors in translation by LLMs leading to incorrect directive information, and risks of attackers potentially exploiting contract metadata confusion. However, these innovations do not detract from the significance of the innovations brought by Wayfinder, which not only expands the Echelon Prime ecosystem but also makes Parallel's new Colony AI survival game the first example of a toolkit that Wayfinder can support for different types of games. It also significantly simplifies the complexity of user interactions with games through AI, allowing users to enjoy the fun of gaming and on-chain interactions by controlling AI agents.

Looking ahead, can Parallel leverage its unique card game, Colony, and Wayfinder to lead a new trend in sci-fi and NFT card games, as well as AI games? We look forward to more surprises and breakthroughs from Parallel.