Reminds me fondly of Karl Sims 91 paper. It gives an impression of what should be possible with relatively simple expressions:

http://www.karlsims.com/papers/siggraph91.html

Dito. Although I got a bit weary of people using Genetic Algorithms to do X. Usually, using a GA is saying "I have no flipping idea how my search space looks like", when the truth is "I've got a good intuition what I'm looking for, but I'm too lazy to formalise this and GAs sound cool". And then you go on and constrain your search space on the wrong level by manually tweaking the Genotype-Phenotype-Mapping.

GAs are good a good optimization tool once you've broken down your search space to a domain that is so absurdly small that manually fiddling with parameters produces no noticeable change. For exploring interesting patterns and areas of a search space, the algorithm you're looking for is called "random()".

Wow, that's really awesome; hadn't seen that before. While it's not nearly at that level yet, I'd love to get to the point where I'm generating content as nice as he managed to. Hopefully once I get the genetic algorithm attached I'll start seeing some magic happen.

You may also like Lindenmayer Systems and Context-Free-Grammars (http://www.contextfreeart.org/ )

I always thought a proper CF renderer (or StructureSynth http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/ (my own efforts: https://sites.google.com/site/williamedwardscoder/home/exten... )) would make a great JS1K entry :)

Thanks a lot for these. I know of Context Free but had no idea about StructureSynth. I sense a WebGL port in the very near future.

I see you too are interested in procedural content for games :)

http://opencity.sourceforge.net/B/viewtopic.php?t=55 might be interesting, especially the links

Also, see CityEngine:

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/research.html

Generating whole cities procedurally using certain themes(for example, ancient Pompei - http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/images/frontispiece_p...):

See also https://github.com/darius/tusdl/blob/master/evo.c inspired by Sims 10 years ago, some results at http://djb.deviantart.com/gallery/ and http://wry.me/~darius/gallery/index.html.

using hsv rather than rgb often works better for this kind of thing (structures look "more coherent").

"Error establishing a database connection"

Any mirror ?

Don't have a mirror handy, but here's the markdown for the post (minus some edits I did on the site for clarity): http://pastie.org/3584715