You-Only-Randomize-Once: Shaping Statistical Properties in Constraint-based PCG

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Katz, Jediah, Bateni, Bahar, Smith, Adam M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Katz, Jediah
Bateni, Bahar
Smith, Adam M.
author_facet Katz, Jediah
Bateni, Bahar
Smith, Adam M.
contents In procedural content generation, modeling the generation task as a constraint satisfaction problem lets us define local and global constraints on the generated output. However, a generator's perceived quality often involves statistics rather than just hard constraints. For example, we may desire that generated outputs use design elements with a similar distribution to that of reference designs. However, such statistical properties cannot be expressed directly as a hard constraint on the generation of any one output. In contrast, methods which do not use a general-purpose constraint solver, such as Gumin's implementation of the WaveFunctionCollapse (WFC) algorithm, can control output statistics but have limited constraint propagation ability and cannot express non-local constraints. In this paper, we introduce You-Only-Randomize-Once (YORO) pre-rolling, a method for crafting a decision variable ordering for a constraint solver that encodes desired statistics in a constraint-based generator. Using a solver-based WFC as an example, we show that this technique effectively controls the statistics of tile-grid outputs generated by several off-the-shelf SAT solvers, while still enforcing global constraints on the outputs.1 Our approach is immediately applicable to WFC-like generation problems and it offers a conceptual starting point for controlling the design element statistics in other constraint-based generators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_00837
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle You-Only-Randomize-Once: Shaping Statistical Properties in Constraint-based PCG
Katz, Jediah
Bateni, Bahar
Smith, Adam M.
Artificial Intelligence
Logic in Computer Science
In procedural content generation, modeling the generation task as a constraint satisfaction problem lets us define local and global constraints on the generated output. However, a generator's perceived quality often involves statistics rather than just hard constraints. For example, we may desire that generated outputs use design elements with a similar distribution to that of reference designs. However, such statistical properties cannot be expressed directly as a hard constraint on the generation of any one output. In contrast, methods which do not use a general-purpose constraint solver, such as Gumin's implementation of the WaveFunctionCollapse (WFC) algorithm, can control output statistics but have limited constraint propagation ability and cannot express non-local constraints. In this paper, we introduce You-Only-Randomize-Once (YORO) pre-rolling, a method for crafting a decision variable ordering for a constraint solver that encodes desired statistics in a constraint-based generator. Using a solver-based WFC as an example, we show that this technique effectively controls the statistics of tile-grid outputs generated by several off-the-shelf SAT solvers, while still enforcing global constraints on the outputs.1 Our approach is immediately applicable to WFC-like generation problems and it offers a conceptual starting point for controlling the design element statistics in other constraint-based generators.
title You-Only-Randomize-Once: Shaping Statistical Properties in Constraint-based PCG
topic Artificial Intelligence
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00837