Roguelike celebration has a ton of content on procedural generation techniques and its worth watching all of them, but this one was one of my favorites.
I am toying with the idea of constructing a virtual social network of artificial persons. It should have a population of artificial people each having a believable friends and family.
How do I go about making a believable social graph?
Start from a random graph, then simulate relationship dynamics. People who know each other are more likely to be at the same location, and people who are at the same location have some likelihood of getting to know each other, creating circles of friends. Some people eventually have children together and if they have more, it's likely to be with the same person. Iterate for a few generations and you should get a reasonable graph of friends and family.
The harder part is probably procedurally generating believable social activity to communicate those relationships to an observer with enough variety to be interesting.
No Man's Sky is the most impressive implementation of this in a game that I've ever seen. Not just basic data defining the systems and the planets and stars within them, but the fractal detail that is each world full of flora, fauna, etc.
I can't help but to do a shameless plug: the author also have an article about L-Systems [0] which inspired me to create my own interactive generator [1]. There isn't a release yet, but it is mainly functional and I already have some awesome results! Here is a video demo [2] and some produced L-Systems [3].
This reminded me of the cosmological fine-tuning argument : that there are few precisely fine-tuned constants which seeded the universe in it's inception, which lead to complexity (life, planets, galaxies) emerging in the universe.
Elite is the granddaddy of all open-universe space sims. It was also super impressive technically, not only for the pseudorandom world generation but for the 3D space combat in a time when simply drawing a single line on the screen took a perceptible duration.
How AI will change 3D industry
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FlgLxSLsYWQ
Procedural world generation for Far Cry
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NfizT369g60
Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4aw9uyj9MAE
Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff)
https://www.anastasiaopara.com/talks
Procedurally generating 3D landscape in Houdini (a little tutorial I have made, can't resist sharing)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=o3mbIRZhv20