
Minecraft, Enhance :Using Neural Networks to Upscale and Stylize Pixel Art - mariuz
https://nucl.ai/blog/enhance-pixel-art/
======
eggy
Yes, AI and art has been around for a while now, but I thought they were going
to show Minecraft running with enhanced textures. I saw the still shot at the
end of the article, and was curious. When I went further, and saw a class
being offered, I was really excited only to find out it started October 15th
2015, and still has the sign-up listed. Then I tried to possibly join, but
after seeing I would need to spend upwards of $388 per year to listen to a
conference recording, I bowed out. I am not against paying, but as a hobbyist,
I would venture $120 / year for access to conference and broadcast recordings,
resources and forums. I can see sandboxes and courses being additional.

~~~
nahumfarchi
I find applications of AI to art very interesting. Do you have any pointers?

~~~
eggy
I actually prefer the term CI, or computational intelligence over AI. There is
a wide gamut of things using CI or AI to do or explore art, with art being a
very flexible concept. I consider 'Inceptionism' a form of art [1]. I did some
personal explorations using GA (Genetic Algorithms) to score some music to my
liking by letting the system evolve short melodies, and then based on a -1, 0,
1 score I gave them, evolve more samples for me to listen to. I played with
Mathematica quite a bit after Stephen Wolfram published 'A New Kind of
Science', and tried creating CAs (cellular automata) that started on one of
the sides as well as the top, and created my own rules for where they
intersected on the diaganol with restarts. I am now into livecoding music and
graphics at a beginner level, and I am already trying to incorporate feedback,
or competitive coding by a neural network doing time series analysis on my
output and playing off of me like a jazz musician would, but it is in the
concept, and prototype stage now. A conceptual idea I had in the 1990s
involved writing a computer virus whose purpose was to replicate, and hide
undetected in the system with no purpose to do harm, or do anything for that
matter, but only to serve as a 'time-capsule' with a message to be released in
the year 2000. I thought creating code that could evolve to seek new places to
place itself on its own would be cool, and have a message popup on many
terminals or out of a printer saying, "I am alive!". Needless to say I learned
a lot about self-modifying code, but never created it. I think game AI is
incredible, but it is a field I have only read about. I am sure there are a
lot of things going on that you wouldn't guess from just playing the game.
Unfortunately, I have never really been a gamer; it just never bit me.

    
    
      [1]  http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.id/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html

------
eropple
This looks really, really cool. I'm curious how it handles tiling; I only
glanced at the examples but retaining repetition behavior is pretty important
for this sort of thing.

~~~
nrjames
You could easily extrapolate from those textures to a Wang tileset, as
explained in this old paper from Microsoft Research "Wang Tiles for Image and
Texture Generation":
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8d96/c38065ddee67daac5390cf...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8d96/c38065ddee67daac5390cf65486648b970f8.pdf)

------
xaedes
Very interesting! As I saw the last picture picture I immediatly thought why
not apply landscape photography reference textures to the whole minecraft
screen output.

------
LoSboccacc
this is a brilliant form of texture compression, I think something like this
was used in the demo scene, but based off manually tuned perlin noise
superposition, instead of having a nn driving the generation.

------
splatcollision
Please release as a texture pack! Thanks!

~~~
nacs
Numerous high-resolution texture packs have been around for years.

Minecraft by default ships with a 16x16 or 32x32 pixel tile size texture pack
but community-made packs have much higher resolutions if you want them
(128x128 tiles, 256x256, etc).

~~~
splatcollision
True. I guess I was trying to point out that it is fancy they used a NN to
generate new textures, but without releasing it out as a texture pack, they
lose a cool opportunity to let people experience the results themselves. I
suspect that the screenshot at the bottom simply used one of the existing high
resolution texture / shader packs.

