Yes, AI and art has been around for a while now, but I thought they were going to show Minecraft running with enhanced textures. I saw the still shot at the end of the article, and was curious. When I went further, and saw a class being offered, I was really excited only to find out it started October 15th 2015, and still has the sign-up listed. Then I tried to possibly join, but after seeing I would need to spend upwards of $388 per year to listen to a conference recording, I bowed out. I am not against paying, but as a hobbyist, I would venture $120 / year for access to conference and broadcast recordings, resources and forums. I can see sandboxes and courses being additional.
> show Minecraft running with enhanced textures. I saw the still shot at the end of the article, and was curious
I'm reasonably sure that still shot is not a real-time/in-game shot. It looks to be rendered with Chunky [1] (an out-of-game renderer which takes hours/days to render a still shot). This is why you're seeing such a large render-distance and things like depth of field/soft-shadows.
I actually prefer the term CI, or computational intelligence over AI. There is a wide gamut of things using CI or AI to do or explore art, with art being a very flexible concept. I consider 'Inceptionism' a form of art [1]. I did some personal explorations using GA (Genetic Algorithms) to score some music to my liking by letting the system evolve short melodies, and then based on a -1, 0, 1 score I gave them, evolve more samples for me to listen to. I played with Mathematica quite a bit after Stephen Wolfram published 'A New Kind of Science', and tried creating CAs (cellular automata) that started on one of the sides as well as the top, and created my own rules for where they intersected on the diaganol with restarts. I am now into livecoding music and graphics at a beginner level, and I am already trying to incorporate feedback, or competitive coding by a neural network doing time series analysis on my output and playing off of me like a jazz musician would, but it is in the concept, and prototype stage now.
A conceptual idea I had in the 1990s involved writing a computer virus whose purpose was to replicate, and hide undetected in the system with no purpose to do harm, or do anything for that matter, but only to serve as a 'time-capsule' with a message to be released in the year 2000. I thought creating code that could evolve to seek new places to place itself on its own would be cool, and have a message popup on many terminals or out of a printer saying, "I am alive!". Needless to say I learned a lot about self-modifying code, but never created it. I think game AI is incredible, but it is a field I have only read about. I am sure there are a lot of things going on that you wouldn't guess from just playing the game. Unfortunately, I have never really been a gamer; it just never bit me.
This looks really, really cool. I'm curious how it handles tiling; I only glanced at the examples but retaining repetition behavior is pretty important for this sort of thing.
Very interesting!
As I saw the last picture picture I immediatly thought why not apply landscape photography reference textures to the whole minecraft screen output.
this is a brilliant form of texture compression, I think something like this was used in the demo scene, but based off manually tuned perlin noise superposition, instead of having a nn driving the generation.
Numerous high-resolution texture packs have been around for years.
Minecraft by default ships with a 16x16 or 32x32 pixel tile size texture pack but community-made packs have much higher resolutions if you want them (128x128 tiles, 256x256, etc).
True. I guess I was trying to point out that it is fancy they used a NN to generate new textures, but without releasing it out as a texture pack, they lose a cool opportunity to let people experience the results themselves. I suspect that the screenshot at the bottom simply used one of the existing high resolution texture / shader packs.
