Say you ve written a little procedural generation program. Say it s some art, music or level generator. It looks kinda cool, but after a few generations, you are already bored with it. Somehow, for all your careful design, all your generated results look samey, boring. This is Kate Compton s ten-thousand bowl of oatmeal problem: every bowl [ ]
The dihedral group is the mathematical formalism behind all the rotations and reflections of a regular polygon. For an n sided polygon, there are always n possible rotations, and n reflections, for 2n possible symmetries. Combining any two symmetries gives another from the same group, that is what makes it a group in the mathematical [ ]
I’m fed up of hearing about how LLMs are next token predictors, and therefore they cannot do some task aren’t really doing cognition are just guessing . There’s lots of philosophical objections, but fundamentally, framing AI as next token predictors in the first places is just misleading and inaccurate. Here’s why LLMs aren’t naive next token [ ]
Earth, proudly twinned with Rigel, went the joke. When intelligent life on Rigel was first discovered, it was a sensation. The newly christened Really Improbably Large Interferometer had just picked up on the barest traces of radio signals from the planet. In mystery, there was speculation, possibility, hope. As investigation progressed, every bit of information [ ]
I got interested in logarithmic spirals recently after learning of the connection between periodic grids and the complex exponential transform. I made a fun explorer for you to try out, and made the trippy looping animation below.
I ve been wrestling with the balance between vibe coding and high touch manual coding these days. At the level of quality I m trying to output, you cannot delegate everything to agents. But you want to do so as much as possible. To do this effectively means developing a new set of coding smells. The original [ ]
Previously, we looked at how to sample points randomly at a given density across an infinite plane. It s harder than it sounds, as I was looking for an algorithm that was not biased by the size/shape of the chunks used to calculate it. Today let s extend that to filling the infinite plane with random non-overlapping [ ]
I ve added an article on handling infinite sized procedural generation to the Sylves documentation. It s probably of interest to readers of this blog as the techniques are fairly general.
I recently went to NeurIPS, the world s largest academic AI conference. This was a multi-purpose trip: present a poster at the MechInterp Workshop and hobnob with other AI Safety researchers; get a general impression of state of the art in AI, particularly the gamedev/creative space, and represent Timaeus, the company I ve recently joined. General Observations [ ]
I ve been enjoying Silksong a lot, but sadly it is not a game where you can trust the developers to leave good signposting and guidance. I don t like to use game guides, so I ended up wasting a lot of time in this game, and then had to resort to guides anyway. Here are some [ ]