Hacker Remix

World Emulation via Neural Network

202 points by treesciencebot 16 hours ago | 37 comments

alekseiprokopev 11 minutes ago

It would be quite interesting to try to mess with the neural representations do add or remove the images of some objects there. I'm also curious if the topology of the actual place is similar to the topology of the embedding space.

stormfather 43 minutes ago

Its a time capsule, among other things. I want to take many, many videos of my grandpa's farm, and be able to walk around in it in VR using something like this in the future.

das_keyboard 5 hours ago

> So, if traditional game worlds are paintings, neural worlds are photographs. Information flows from sensor to screen without passing through human hands.

I don't get this analogy at all. Instead of a human information flows through a neural network which alters the information.

> Every lifelike detail in the final world is only there because my phone recorded it.

I might be wrong here but I don't think this is true. It might also be there because the network inferred that it is there based on previous data.

Imo this just takes the human out of a artistic process - creating video game worlds and I'm not sure if this is worth archiving.

ajb 5 hours ago

>I don't get this analogy at all. Instead of a human information flows through a neural network which alters the information.

These days most photos are also stored using lossy compression which alters the information.

You can think of this as a form of highly lossy compression of an image of this forest in time and space.

Most lossy compression is 'subtractive' in that detail is subtracted from the image in order to compress it, so the kind of alterations are limited. However there have been previous non-subtractive forms of compression (eg, fractal compression) that have been criticised on the basis of making up details, which is certainly something that a neural network will do. However if the network is only trained on this forest data, rather than being also trained on other data and then fine tuned, then in some sense it does only represent this forest rather than giving an 'informed impression' like a human artist would.

Valk3_ 8 hours ago

This might be a vague question, but what kind of intuition or knowledge do you need to work with these kind of things, say if you want to make your own model? Is it just having experience with image generation and trying to incorporate relevant inputs that you would expect in a 3D world, like the control information you added for instance?