The Library of Babel

“The Library of Babel” is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about a library with every book that could ever be written. The ideas it discusses touch on the meaning of language itself.

But what if you could experience the library for yourself? Take one of an infinite number of volumes off the shelf and flip through it. Now you can.

The text of every Tumblr post ever written is in one of those books. And reversed. And translated. And in code. Your name is in there. This post is in there. As is every post I am going to write in the future.

In an incredibly clever feat, the library is searchable. You can read how it’s done, if you want a glimpse behind the curtain, or you can just browse at random and discover texts no human has ever encountered before.

Dreamer of Electric Sheep (2014)

A procedurally generated text adventure by Tom Coxton. Text adventure content has a long history in procedural generation, but what makes Dreamer of Electric Sheep interesting to talk about is its combination of the ConceptNet database of relationships between concepts and its machine-dreaming framing. The interactions are sometimes disturbingly logical.

http://tccoxon.itch.io/dreamer

Crypt of the NecroDancer (2015)

Simply the best procedurally generated dance-rhythm roguelike dungeon crawler I’ve ever played.

I mean, it’s not like there are a lot of those. But there are some interesting things going on procedurally. The long-term progression of the game revolves around unlocking new content and tools, which are then seeded into the dungeon generator. There are also procedurally-generated mini-puzzles in the dungeon, in the form of optional characters to rescue by finding the key that will let them out.

It’s more about items than about the terrain (though there are also ways to alter future generation) but it is a very effective coupling of the generator and gameplay, and one that other roguelikes could easily borrow from. Imagine taking it further, with your progression unlocking new rooms or other terrain content for the generator.

But NecroDancer deliberately keeps the dungeon generation itself pretty simple. Each level has a handful of rooms, connected with corridors, and maybe a shop or some hidden chambers. These are not huge levels. But they don’t have to be: NecroDancer is comfortable with letting the main rhythm mechanic dictate the pace, which means the time you spend exploring is more frantic than even a game with time-limited levels like Spelunky. The tight constraints mean that you don’t need a huge open world.

The other reason that the levels work is because you can alter them. Your shovel is nearly as important as your weapon, and smart use of digging combined with items that alter how you dig opens up new tactical options and changes your relationship with the procedurally generated terrain. Effectively, the game mechanics mean that your interactions with each level are operating on several levels.

http://necrodancer.com/

https://twitter.com/pixelsorter/status/601540587548909568

https://twitter.com/pixelsorter/status/601402188544507904

Pixel Sorter is a twitter bot written by Way Spurr-Chen. It takes images tweeted to it and sorts the pixels in it via various algorithms. Since it takes any image tweeted at it, other bots sometimes send it images to manipulate with its glitch aesthetic. 

https://twitter.com/pixelsorter

Secret Habitat (2014)

Secret Habitat is a world of procedurally generated art galleries populated with procedurally generated artwork. The landscape returns to Strangethink’s ultrafuture CGA aesthetic, while the abstract paintings and generated sound loops create a context for your explorations.

The artwork in each gallery tends to have a unifying theme, subtly but effectively making each gallery unique. Despite the galleries being superficially similar, their collections feel distinct. It demonstrates how generated worlds can create interesting structure purely through smart choices in visual and spatial arrangement. You can still get lost pretty easily, but I never had the sense that the new gallery I found myself in was a mere repetition of what I had seen before.

http://strangethink.itch.io/secret-habitat

algopop:

prostheticknowledge:

Novice Art Blogger: Tumblr bot art blog by plummerfernandez features interpretation of artworks from a deep learning algorithm:

Novice Art Blogger is an automated art blog that takes images and meta-data of abstract art from the online archive of the Tate, and processes those images through online access to Deep Learning algorithms developed by computer scientists at the University of Toronto (test it yourself here). The algorithms attempt to decode the art and identify its content, generating captions for the image. It also finds the image’s ‘Nearest Neighbour’, an image in the database that is similar. My software then reformats those responses into blogposts.
More Here, You can follow noviceartblogger here

*algopop note: I made this very much for the algopop audience, sorry I didn’t immediately share it with you :-) Novice Art Blogger continues to blog and will be in a group show soon, doing its thing with the host museum’s art collection.

This counts, I think. And I have a new blog to follow!

Lacunarity is the measure of gaps in patterns. A pattern with more or larger gaps has high lacunarity, a pattern with fewer or smaller gaps has low lacunarity. 

Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term in his work with fractals. As it turns out, measuring lacunarity has a number of real-world applications, but for our purposes here we’re mostly interested it as one of the major measurements of fractals. 

Lacunarity measures how quickly the frequency changes for each successive octave. It’s actually better to avoid round numbers in setting lacunarity for many noise functions; transcendental numbers are less likely to show obvious repeating patterns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacunarity

Sometimes it’s about learning from what doesn’t work.

More stuff from Introversion’s canceled Subversion project: this time procedurally generating building interiors.

Generating interesting and realistic modern building interiors is difficult, as many modern-setting roguelike designers have discovered to their dismay. It’s an open problem, and very few games have managed to make personal-scale procedural generation work in a modern setting. Maybe you have an idea for making it work? Or know of a game that does get it right? (There’s some unreleased projects I have great hopes for.)

In the case of Subversion, they discovered that it was more interesting to design the buildings and defend against the heists rather than executing them, so they switched to making Prison Architect. Which, alas, has less procedural generation, though it does have agent-based AI.