Mark GritterThe recording is up of @pyrofoux 's talk at #RoguelikeCelebration. I enjoyed this one, it was very thought-provoking. (My earlier post has a link to his paper with Mike Cook.)
blog.lmorchard.com2025 Week 44
https://blog.lmorchard.com/2025/10/30/w44/
TL;DR: It was my birthday this week, which my BBS remembered! Celebrated by dialing into BBSes from an actual Amiga 1200 and C64. Also: evangelized Bazzite Linux for gaming, fell down a Roguelike Celebration rabbit hole of procedural generation and non-euclidean games, shipped a new release of my feed-to-mastodon tool, and bookmarked way too many things about AI hype and data centers using jet engines for power.
#weeknotes #birthday #bbs #retrocomputing #amiga #c64 #ai #webdev #data #roguelikecelebration
2025 Week 44
TL;DR: It was my birthday this week, which my BBS remembered! Celebrated by dialing into BBSes from an actual Amiga 1200 and C64. Also: evangelized Bazzite Linux for gaming, fell down a Roguelike Celebration rabbit hole of procedural generation and non-euclidean games, shipped a new release of my feed-to-mastodon tool, and bookmarked way too many things about AI hype and data centers using jet engines for power.
Some generative artists suggested from people at #RoguelikeCelebration
and of course speakers @bleeptrack https://www.bleeptrack.de/
and Ada Null: https://worldenddisk.com/
High-res version of the visualization I showed in my #RoguelikeCelebration talk. (Hopefully is shows up better here!)
Source code slides, and images at https://github.com/mgritter/rogue-room-generation
Yay, weirdo programming languages at #RoguelikeCelebration
Seth Cooper on writing a roguelike with tile rewriting. #ProgrammingLanguages #Esolang
I missed the screenshot, but one of the inputs to Nifflas's music generator was random choice of "random sequences people gave him on Twitter". I love this as a way to get sequences that _feel_ random to people instead of actually being random!
The screenshot here is a totally off-the-hook sequencer that picks notes based on the Monty Hall problem, with different settings for the game -- for example, is the host evil? Does the host have to open a door at all?
Paul Dean at #RoguelikeCelebration gave a looping, nonlinear narrative about nonlinear narratives.
New games I bought from the #RoguelikeCelebration sale: "Let's! Revolution!", "Dungeon Inn", and "Star Birds": https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41222044/sale/RoguelikeCelebration2025
I was inspired to take a look at the PICO-8 RNG by some of the #RoguelikeCelebration talks, and it looks like it is unfortunately Not Good: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=81103 #pico8 #prng
"We Are Maxwell's Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators" by Younès Rabii at #RoguelikeCelebration.
We can study generative systems using thermodynamics as an analogy -- a treatment of this in detail can be found in their paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02131
You can write the same generator compactly (high pressure) or readably (high volume) but it produces the same product of number of artifacts (N) and "temperature"/complexity (T). If you want more complexity, you have to pay for it in terms of more code.
With some additional simplifications you can plot a phase diagram -- the space of possibilities ranges from "white noise" to "single compressed artifact" to "interesting generative system."
But there is no free lunch here, to compress the space of good artifacts to a generator requires the work to identify those in the first place -- and today, that is being done by humans and creators, not Generative AI.
