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Show HN: Wave function collapse algorithm
- chrischen 10y agoCool. I wonder what the results are on a high resolution image.
- vinchuco 10y agoGoogle maps could maybe be interesting. Create alternate Earth maps to use... somehow... logistics? climate?
- ExUtumno 10y agoI wonder too =). But it'll run like forever on a high res image. For high res image you want to use something like texture synthesis, see my reply to fitzwatermellow for more.
- valine 10y agoYou should add some gifs with a lower frame rate. I had to download the one you had and walk through frame by frame. Absolutely beautiful.
- TheRealPomax 10y agolower framerate, or lower playback speed?
- vinchuco 10y agoProbably meant playback speed. Probably you knew this.
- ExUtumno 10y agoThanks! Yeah, you a right, I'll upload slower gifs. Right now youtube video has the slowest speed, in fact it has segments with no frame-skipping at all: https://youtu.be/DOQTr2Xmlz0 https://youtu.be/DOQTr2Xmlz0
- fitzwatermellow 10y agoGreat work! The fact that it captures "long-range order" seemingly perfectly is something not many have been able to do before! And the "collapse" visualization is great fun to watch. But is your algorithm really qualitatively all that different from previous search methods (e.g. Efros and Leung), if you are still (uniform random?) sampling over the input distribution of patches? I notice also your input textures tend to have sharp boundaries (as is common in pixel art). It would be interesting to see the results when the input has a lot of "noise", such as high def images of rocks or clouds ;) While I still prefer search methods because they are easy to implement (and give better results), "deep" methods are definitely gaining some ground: Deep Textures http://bethgelab.org/deeptextures/ http://bethgelab.org/deeptextures/ Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synthesis https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589
- ExUtumno 10y agoThanks! Efros' and Leung's method doesn't satisfy the (C1) condition. The closest previous work is Paul Merrel's model synthesis. WFC and texture synthesis serve similar purposes: they produce images similar to the input image. However, the definition of what is "similar" is different in each case. If you have a high def input with noise (like realistic rocks and clouds) then you really want to to use texture synthesis methods. If you have an indexed image with few colors and you want to capture... something like the inner rules of that image and long range correlations (if you have an output of a cellular automata, for example, or a dungeon), then you want to use WFC-like methods. Btw, I have classic texture synthesis algos in a different repo: https://github.com/mxgmn/SynTex https://github.com/mxgmn/SynTex
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agoThis is pretty awesome, but there is no LICENSE file so I'm assuming no one is allowed to use it in their own projects.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoThe source files say its distributed under the MIT license.
- nitrix 10y agoI opened this ticket: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse/issues/2 https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse/issues/2
- ExUtumno 10y agoI'm not experienced with the license law, but people told me that it's better to have license text in source files themselves, because I have samples in the repo that I have no idea who has rights for. The license is MIT.
- tgb 10y agoThis is great. Someone should make a Minecraft plugin.
- mc42 10y agoThe way I see it, this would be the perfect way to produce semi-altered terrain sprites automatically. Right now,the textures are pseudo-randomly rotated for things like dirt blocks, grass tops, and stone. [1] However, with this you could create a multitude of different textures based off a single source. Plus, dungeons could be a lot more interesting. It'd be interesting to see what could be done with it... [1] - http://i.imgur.com/UJeLy.png http://i.imgur.com/UJeLy.png
- twfarland 10y agoMindblowing... could this technique also be applied to music?
- kowdermeister 10y agoIt should be, at least on audio level it would work. It would make a nice VST :)
- mistagiggles 10y agoSomething similar does exist: http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html It detects places in songs where the sound is similar, and can jump between these places in the track to make a seamless unending song.
- ExUtumno 10y agoI doubt it, because music is 1-dimensional and for 1-dimensional arrays WFC is just a Markov chain.
- barrkel 10y agoThere are three-dimensional views of music, e.g. time-frequency-amplitude. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram
- ssalazar 10y agoSpectrogram is 2D (plot of amplitude given time and frequency). Its interesting to think about it for a spectrogram because "similarity" is different in each dimension (freq vs. time). Frequency is also perceived logarithmically, so you would probably want to convert to e.g. Mel scale before applying this algorithm (a 2000-2100Hz change is much subtler than a 200-300Hz change).
- jmilloy 10y ago
- hood_syntax 10y agoVery cool, might try do something like this in a game I've been thinking about writing.
- angelftbcn 10y agoWow!
- etatoby 10y agoThis is great! It would be interesting to apply this concept to wavelets (instead of pixels or voxels) in order to work on real-life pictures. Also, 3 dimensions as in X, Y and time, to work on animated GIFs. Think about an infinite, never repeating Blue Ball Machine! http://m.imgur.com/5Flh68G http://m.imgur.com/5Flh68G
- chronolitus 10y agoThis is crazy, and I think it hints at the possibility of universe creation: you start from a finite pattern, which becomes the 'rules' of your created universe. Then, using this wave function collapse algorithm you expand it into an infinity where the possibilities are endless within the constraints of those generator rules
- borgel 10y agoIf you enjoy pondering on that, you may enjoy reading Permutation City [1] by Greg Egan. [1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City
- brianpgordon 10y agoOne of my absolute favorite sci-fi novels, and it changed my thoughts on philosophy of mind more than any other book.
- Keyframe 10y agoPremise of New Kind of Science, basically.
- antirez 10y agoVery cool algorithm, and impressive visual results. Thanks for sharing.
- bduerst 10y agoI don't have much to contribute to the conversation on this other than that it's incredibly cool.
- sushisource 10y agoMy thoughts exactly. I will definitely read through this to understand it by my first impression was "This is so fucking neat!"
- phaedrus 10y agoThis requires no more up front work than a Markov-based technique, but produces results on par with an L-grammar. It may be generally applicable to the problem domains of both!
- xixixao 10y agoAmazing. Make sure to scroll through the whole README to see voxel models. Rendered using http://ephtracy.github.io/index.html http://ephtracy.github.io/index.html which is in itself pretty cool too.
- ianai 10y agoI'm missing a lot here. How does this equate to wave function collapse?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vinchuco 10y ago>with the help of ideas from quantum mechanics. >so it doesn't do the actual quantum mechanics, but it was inspired by QM.
- netsec_burn 10y agoYea, my only disagreement here is the name.
- vinchuco 10y agoCan you feed it something other than bitmaps? Like its own source code?
- kazinator 10y agoOn that tangent, it could be useful for fuzzing inputs to image analysis algorithms.
- ExUtumno 10y agoSource code is a 1-dimensional array. For 1-dimensional arrays WFC is just a Markov chain. 2 and higher dimensional arrays are much more interesting because they have cycles, and there is no canonical way to generalize Markov chains to higher dimensions.
- wyager 10y agoJust to make sure I understand, if I were to use 1D WFC with 1xN tiles, would it be the same as an (N-1)th order Markov chain? Or would it be a 1st-order Markov chain with (N-1) simultaneous outputs?
- ExUtumno 10y agoIf you use overlapping model (there are 2 models in the repo) with 1xN patterns, it would be a the same as (N-1)th order Markov chain.
- alexmorenodev 10y agoExtremely nice to create procedural maps and other stuff. Really nice.
- Sharlin 10y agoThis could be extra awesome if it could be made small and fast enough to be able to execute as a fragment shader.
- ExUtumno 10y agoWell, right now it is not fast at all. :) But I plan to think about the problem of generating pixel shaders form examples in the future.
- psyc 10y agoThis is amazing, and could have very cool applications in procedural generation.
- throwaway000002 10y agoBrilliant! Don't really understand the technique, but would like your thoughts on if it's possible to give a Penrose tile set as a seed and see if aperiodic order is generated. Lovin' it!
- ExUtumno 10y agoThanks! I'm not sure, but I think that Penrose tilesets are what I call "easy": you can't run into a situation where you can't place a new tile. It would be great if someone here could confirm or deny this. So if this is the case, then Penrose tilesets are not interesting to WFC, because you can produce arbitrary tilings with much simpler algorithms. Right now though WFC is only working with square tiles, but it's not hard to generalize it to arbitrary shapes. Paul F. Harrison made a tiling program that supports hex tiles: http://logarithmic.net/pfh/ghost-diagrams http://logarithmic.net/pfh/ghost-diagrams See also the relevant paragraph in the readme (just search the word "easy").
- DennisP 10y agoMaybe it could be interesting to place Penrose tiles with the simple algorithm, but color them with your algorithm just like you're currently coloring squares.
- ExUtumno 10y agoSo basically make a not-easy tileset with the shapes of Penrose tiles. Yes, this could be interesting.
- hackpert 10y agoI think you're right about Penrose tiles being easy. One could, however, potentially use this with polygonal tiles to find their Heesch numbers and maybe even make some advancements in solving some of the many unsolved problems associated with Heesch tiling.
- derefr 10y agoPenrose tiles are "easy" on an unbounded canvas, but I'm pretty sure they're a 100%-probable "contradiction" (because they're aperiodic) on a bounded toroidal canvas.
- amelius 10y agoThis reminds me of the quite powerful PatchMatch algorithm [1]. Is it related? Also note how PatchMatch can work with constraints. [1] http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-69-fa11/wiki/images/1/18/05-PatchMatch.pdf http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-69-fa11/wiki/images/1/...
- ExUtumno 10y agoPatchMatch is an algorithm to quickly... match similar patches in an image, it is used in a lot of texture synthesis algos. See my answer to fitzwatermellow for the difference between texture synthesis and WFC. So yes, it's related. Photoshop's implementation of PatchMatch handles constraints perfectly, yes.
- wodencafe 10y agoThat's incredible! This could be great for generating maps in a sprite based strategy game!
- khalilravanna 10y agoAs a person currently rewriting the mapgen algorithm for their Dwarf-Fortress-like game, I'm very excited to experiment with this this weekend =D
- Sire 10y agoCool, got anything to show? :)
- khalilravanna 10y agoAs far as the game? Sure I got a blog over here => http://ripplega.me/development/month-development-feb-08/ http://ripplega.me/development/month-development-feb-08/ If you meant the map specifically, at a high level I haven't changed the algorithm (yet) so you can check out an overview of my current one here: http://ripplega.me/development/month-development-may-10/ http://ripplega.me/development/month-development-may-10/ The blog itself hasn't been updated it in a while as I've been in the midst of some pretty serious rewrites/refactors over the past several months. Since that post I've rewritten the game in TypeScript, rewritten the core engine to use the ECS (Entity Component System) pattern, and right now am actually in the midst of a rewrite of pretty much the whole game. Hence I mentioned the rewrite of the mapgen code, the first version of which was probably written 2 years ago hehe. I had a huge amount of features built up over 2 years (idealogically similar to DF in that regard heh) but realized I needed to pare down the feature set to get an alpha out so people could play. It's also allowing me to address some fundamental flaws that the engine built up over the past year or two. So that's the point where I'm at now. Feel free to sub to the mailing list if you'd like to know about any updates and when the game comes to fruition you'll be notified ;)
- isoprophlex 10y agoThanks for posting this! Really exciting work!
- ejcx 10y agoI love that one of the files is "Stuff.cs". Super neat visuals and I can't wait to play with this, as someone who knows nothing about this kind of "stuff".
- Myrmornis 10y agoThe README says it uses real-valued probability amplitudes, not complex-valued wavefunction. Could the simulation be done with complex numbers and if so how would the results differ?
- ExUtumno 10y agoWe need to interpret those coefficients somehow. Real coefficients can be interpreted as mixing of colors, but for complex ones I don't see a good interpretation.
- michrassena 10y agoI don't have much to contribute other than to say this is really amazing, and I want to throw all kinds of things at it and see what happens. Pardon my ignorance of how this works, does this algorithm have anything to do with symmetry breaking?
- ExUtumno 10y agoThanks! No, not really. ConvChain though is related to symmetry breaking, the same way as MCMC simulation of the Ising model is https://github.com/mxgmn/ConvChain https://github.com/mxgmn/ConvChain
- michrassena 10y agook thanks. The ConvChain project is also very interesting.
- artursapek 10y agoAmazing. If this is fast enough, I imagine it could do wonders for games (terrain and background generation).
- natch 10y agoWhat language is this? How can I compile / run it?
- nhatbui 10y agoIt's C#. I'm not familiar with it which is why I was surprised that after downloading Visual Studio Tools, I opened Developer Command Prompt, I did a `csc *.cs` and I was left with one nice executable, Main.exe.
- phodo 10y agoNicely done! Your 3d extensions could be further extended (performance notwithstanding) to create some pretty cool procedurally generated VR experiences. Thanks for sharing.
- matthewwiese 10y agoExcellent! I especially like the example third from the top (black/white "rooms"). This would be a great tool to generate maps for roguelikes in a more "organic" fashion. Not only that, but the bitmap source you use for input would provide wildly different results. Given that and the simplicity of just providing a bitmap as input, this could be adapted well to provide customization to the player as well.
- xer0x 10y agoI don't quite get it, but damn it's awesome!
- Balgair 10y agoFantastic stuff. I love it! As with most meachine learning stuff and these very cool ideas (of which I am very hazy on, esp their categorizations) I immediately want to use it for our lab's brain work. We have a LOT of 3-D images (per voxel is ~200nmx200nmx~600nm for a lot of 1028x1028 .tiff images all stitched together) and would love to feed these images BACKWARDS into this. IE we have the 'far field', and we want the 'elements' that make it up. Say we have a large amount of data on the Pituitary gland, and we want to compare the 'elements' of the Pituitary to the 'elements' of the hippocampus. We know a lot of these differences, but there may be 'something else' in there that we humans are not seeing. This may be of great use to use for disease pathology like Lewy Body Disease precursors.
- 4bpp 10y agoSounds like an altogether easier problem, assuming you don't care to compensate for noise in your data somehow - supposing you want to identify all distinct m×n×k-sized "elements", simply use some appropriate rolling hash[1] (i.e. a hash of a window that you can update in constant time as you slide the window) as a key mapping to a list of "elements" you have seen so far with that hash, and only do pointwise comparison (to see if you have seen that exact pattern before) if the hashes match. Assuming you don't have too many distinct elements, this should give you performance close to linear in the size of your data. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_hash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_hash
- Balgair 10y agoWhew, now that was a wikipedia binge. Thanks for the leaping off point! Unfortunately, our data is VERY noisy. We can do some techniques to smooth the data, but the unfortunate part is that the things that matter in biology are under the diffraction limit of light. Inherently, what we want out of the data will then be noisy. Gestalt structures are less noisy and these techniques can help with that (think using a fiber-optic read-out as you go into the brain for surgery so you know what region you are in), at least I think. Also, the 'elements' of our data set are unknown, but likely very large. Maybe in the 100s to 1000s, not 5 or 10. It turns out the brain is complicated, who knew?! Still, thanks a ton for this info! I think it can really help with some computational bio stuff another lab is working on here (viral similarity in genes in your DNA)
- smilekzs 10y agoThe circuit board example looks alarmingly convincing despite it's obvious we're not looking at an actual circuit...
- mirekrusin 10y agoCan this approach be used to generate "missing parts" in unfinished song? If composer has few good parts but is too lazy to finish the whole piece, for example? Or to "extend" Moonlight for example?
- ExUtumno 10y agoThere are special approaches to generating music. The best for ratio of quality/complexity that I know of are Markov constraints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buXqNqBFd6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buXqNqBFd6E and WaveNet. I don't think WFC offers something useful and new for generation of music.
- abecedarius 10y agoAs I understand it: this treats image generation as constraint satisfaction. The constraints are that each NxN patch appears in the source image. The satisfaction method is arc consistency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC-3_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC-3_algorithm, except, when that settles down prematurely, pick the least-constrained patch and make a random valid choice, then continue. (If this leads to getting stuck, then give up instead of backtracking.) Is that the idea? The description wasn't completely clear to me.
- abecedarius 10y ago(I should've said most-constrained)
- ExUtumno 10y agoYes, (C1) is a constraint problem. But we also want to satisfy (C2) as close as possible, otherwise we could have just colored some outputs in a single color.
- abecedarius 10y agoYes, I took that to mean, when you're making a random valid choice, the weights come from the input distribution. I don't understand about "a single color" unless you mean setting all output pixels to the same color, which would only satisfy the constraints if the input has an NxN patch all one color. I hope my comment didn't seem to imply that the work seemed unoriginal. I don't think that; I wanted to check my reading.
- ExUtumno 10y agoMost of the examples in the repo have those NxN all one color patches. Or, without (C2) the algorithm would have generated completely empty integrated circuits, or completely grass terrain, which is really boring. You understood right, it's constraints + probabilities. Btw, I have different algorithm that satisfies (C2) perfectly, but not (C1): https://github.com/mxgmn/ConvChain https://github.com/mxgmn/ConvChain
- WhitneyLand 10y agoVery impressive. I have no use for your work whatsoever yet would love to dive into it further.
- partycoder 10y agoWOW, this is amazing. Really impressed seeing how it can adapt to multiple patterns.
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