Classical procedural generation and modern ML share the same spirit, says Keenan

keenanisalive · x · 2026-09-05

Keenan argues that classical procedural generators share the ethos of contemporary ML: both sample from a distribution conditioned on user-defined parameters, and those classic distributions can likewise be autoregressive, depending on earlier generation steps.

The big differences: 1) contemporary models learn their distributions from data rather than defining them by hand, and 2) ML models are far more general, incorporating cross-domain knowledge instead of being tailored to one domain. "This is a big deal," he says.

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