Here's some comments and links about Wave Function Collapse I wrote recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561910

[...stuff about SandSpielStudio and block visual programming languages like Scratch and Snap!, Long Now talk between Will Wright and Brian Eno about Cellular Automata, etc ...]

The other really cool rabbit hole to explore for generating tiles and even arbitrary graph based content (I'm sold: hexagons are the bestagons!) is "Wave Function Collapse", which doesn't actually have anything to do with quantum mechanics (it just sounds cool), but is actually a kind of constraint solver related to sudoku solvers.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3rm1w0mn/qt3rm1w0mn_noSpl...

Maxim Gumin's work: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

Paul Merrell's work:

https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis/

https://paulmerrell.org/research/

Oskar Stålberg's work:

https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/784847588893814785

https://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html

There's a way to define cellular automata rules by giving examples of the before and after patterns, and WFC is kind of like a statistical constraint solving version of that.

So it's really easy for artists to define rules just by drawing! Not even requiring any visual programming, but you can layer visual programming on top of it.

That's something that Alexander Repenning's "AgentSheets" supported (among other stuff): you could define cellular automata rules by before-and-after examples, wildcards and variables, and attach additional conditions and actions with a visual programming language.

AgentSheets and other cool systems are described in this classic paper: “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It covered many of my favorite systems.

http://donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf

Chaim Gingold wrote a comprehensive "Gadget Background Survey" at HARC, which includes AgentSheets, Alan Kay's favorites: Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before:

http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...

Chaim Gingold has analyzed the SimCity (classic) code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

>SimCity reverse diagrams: Chaim Gingold (2016).

>These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

>The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010). If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

>Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

[... stuff about AgentSheets, KidSim, Lex Fridman interviews of Michael Levin and Steven Wolfram discussing Cellular Automata, CAM6 simulator, etc ...]

More:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561910