My Mental Model of AI Creativity – Creativity Kiki

| Boris

I went to some lectures on the future of science in games recently, and the keynote speaker was Tommy Thompson, an well-known AI expert in the game dev space.

Of course, by AI, he didn’t mean the modern sort that dominates the news. His focus is AI for games, which is algorithmic and rarely involves any ML component. Still, he spoke about the challenges the industry faces regarding Image Generators, LLMs and so on. He specifically called LLMs “stochastic parrots”, which I found disappointing. Imho it’s an incredibly misleading model of what LLMs are capable of and is usually deployed to downplay their abilities and belittle them. But it’s a common view, particularly in creative industries.

So what is a better model? It’s clear that they are not that smart in most ways we consider important, but they do have some interesting capabilities. Here’s model I use that I feel give a better intuition for what they can and cannot do.

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Substitution Tilings

| Boris

I’ve been working on adding aperiodic grids to Sylves.

Aperiodic tilings are made tilings are made of a fixed set of tiles, rotated and translated to fully cover the plane.But they are not periodic – there’s no way to rotate/translate the whole grid onto itself.

This makes them almost hypnotic in their balance of regularity and chaos. A classic example is the penrose tiling.

Images from the Tiling Encyclopedia
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An Uncanny Moat

| Boris

Back in the early days of computer animation, the technology at the time really struggled with realism. The first cartoons were necessarily abstract, or cartoony.

As time progressed, the technology caught up. CGI now can be all but indistinguishable from real life. But there was a brief period, as seen in films like The Polar Express or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, when the artists aimed for realism and didn’t quite get there.

These films were often critically panned. Eventually, it became clear that the cause was quite deep in the human psyche. These films were realistic enough that we’d mentally classify the characters as real humans, but not so realistic that they actually looked normal. On an instinctive level, people reject these imposters far harder than more stylised graphics that don’t have the pretence of reality.

This phenomenon is known as the Uncanny Valley and has influenced visual design of fake people in films, robots, games etc.

For a time, the recent crop of image generators and LLMs fell into the same boat. Twisting people with the wrong number of fingers or teeth was a common source of derision. People are still puzzling over chatbots that can speak very coherently and yet make wild mistakes with none of the inner light you might expect from a real conversationalist.

Now, or at least very soon, AI threatens to cross that valley and advance up the gentle hills on the opposite side. Not only are we faced with a disinformation storm like nothing before, but AI is going to start challenging exactly how we consider personhood itself.

This is something we need to fight, in addition to all the other worries about AI. I don’t want to get into philosophical weeds about whether LLMs could be considered moral patients. But I think our society and thinking are structured around a clear human/non-human divide. Chatbots threaten to unravel that.

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Quantum WaveFunctionCollapse

| Boris

One of my biggest gripes with the WaveFunctionCollapse procedural generation algorithm is that, despite the name, it doesn’t really have anything to do with quantum mechanics. I usually prefer the term Constraint Based Procedural Generation instead.

The name WaveFunctionCollapse is meant more as an analogy. As the algorithm progresses, it resolves a fuzzy, uncertain picture of the output into sharper detail, much as in quantum mechanics, the state of a system is also a range of possibilities, which resolves to something specific when “observed”.

But could we adapt WFC to the Quantum way of thinking, and ran it on actual Quantum Hardware? Well, that’s exactly what is discussed in this new paper Quantum WaveFunctionCollapse by Raoul Heese1 (Youtube summary). Does it work? Is it fast? Let’s find out.

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RuleBook

| Boris

I’m releasing a new open source library, RuleBook. Inspired by Inform 7‘s rulebook feature, it’s a way to make functions by defining a set of rules to evaluate. RuleBooks let you define functions are easy to mod and update at runtime.

Full Docs

What are rulebooks?

Rulebooks are essentially a fancy form of C#’s Func<> and Action<> generics.

Func<> and Action<> can hold a reference to a C# method, or an lambda expression/statement. But the thing they hold is essentially a black box – you cannot do much with it except run it, or check equality.

RuleBook provies FuncBook<> and ActionBook<>, which work similarly to their counterparts. But these rulebook objects are built out of individual rules, which can be individually inspected and mutated.

Overall, rulebooks give a systematic way of handling a bunch of useful programming patterns, including events, multiple dispatch, modding and code weaving.

Rulebooks are not an elaborate rules evaluation engine, it’s a lightweight way of stitching together bits of functionality.

PuzzleScript Rules

| Boris

I was watching ThinkyCon, a conference on making puzzle games, and many designers mentioned that they use PuzzleScript to prototype their ideas. PuzzleScript is a puzzle design environment created by increpare, the designer behind Stephen’s Sausage Roll and many other puzzle games.

PuzzleScript is a marvel of economic design. A single text file specifies, all the graphics, levels, sound effects, and all the rules of the puzzle. It uses a custom system to concisely express rules. So concise that the rules of Sokoban can be expressed in a single line.

This efficiency comes because rules are expressed as find-replace rules. That makes it a grammar replacement system, which I last discussed when looking at Ludoscope and Unexplored. But it has many pragmatic features geared toward puzzle design, which I’ll explore in this article.

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What Is Procedural Generation

| Boris

Procedural Generation can be interpreted quite broadly as just “making computers make cool creative things”. People make art, games, music, audio, stories and all sorts of weird things.

I’ve been doing it as a hobbyist for some time, and have become more and more involved: I make tutorials, projects, I sell a tool online for a niche algorithm, and recently taught a “masterclass” at Everything Procedural, the main conference for professionals in the space.

I thought I’d spill some digital ink about what it’s actually about. I get asked often enough, and this will help me clarify my verbal answers.

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