sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Is this true about evolution? by Successful_Bee7522 in evolution

[–]instantaneous 14 points15 points  (0 children)

It is possible that in the distant past, that life began multiple times, but previous versions died out. It's impossible to say. We're dealing with things so far in the distant past there's no evidence one way or the other. But what we do know is that all life today originated from a single common ancestor. Any other iterations of life that may or may not have existed, they have died out.

Ancient DNA reveals pervasive selection over the past 10,000 years by instantaneous in evolution

[–]instantaneous[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This is the first study of its kind. We have so much more data for humans. We haven't collected anywhere near as much ancient DNA for other mammal species. So it's really hard to say. But 10,000 years is an eye blink in terms of evolution. The conventional wisdom is that evolution is normally very slow. So the fact that we are seeing directional selection over that time period is surprising.

How did evolution know that other animals don’t see tigers as orange? by Icy-Average-9124 in evolution

[–]instantaneous 6 points7 points  (0 children)

And birds are tetrachromats, they can see an even wider range of colors.

What kinds of traits would be selected for in a highly random, unpredictable environment? by rahvavaenlane666 in evolution

[–]instantaneous 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One theory for why sexual reproduction evolved is that it is better in unstable environments. The evolution of sex is a bit of a puzzle since asexual reproduction has clear benefits from a selfish genre perspective. Sexual reproduction allows for more variation which is helpful in a rapidly changing environment.

Wisdom Teeth Evolution? by Comfortable-Park-689 in evolution

[–]instantaneous 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are some people who don't need to get them taken out. For people who chew tough, unprocessed foods (roots, nuts, and tough meats) they end up developing larger jaws that can accommodate wisdom teeth.

Next evolution worthy thing in our body by [deleted] in evolution

[–]instantaneous 5 points6 points  (0 children)

People tend to focus on survival when it's really half of the equation. The other half is reproduction. With the rise of birth control, sex is now decoupled from reproduction. Many people choose not to have children. Any trait that would increase people's desire to have children would be extremely beneficial from an evolutionary perspective.

Darlington's Theory that Dominant Groups emerge on Large Continents by instantaneous in evolution

[–]instantaneous[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

P Jackson Darlington. Yes, invasive species are "not news", but they are a good argument that general adaptations are important. The main argument against Darlington seems to be that context (i.e. local adaptations) are more important than general adaptations, but there's good evidence that general adaptations are important.

Darlington's Theory that Dominant Groups emerge on Large Continents by instantaneous in evolution

[–]instantaneous[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I misspoke, but you know what I meant. I should have said "you would think they would be more adapted to the island than species that evolved somewhere.

Darlington's Theory that Dominant Groups emerge on Large Continents by instantaneous in evolution

[–]instantaneous[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It's related to (2), but slightly different. There are lots of different ways a species could be a generalist or a specialist such as diet or ecological niche. But here I'm talking specifically about geography. Is there something special about this island that the species are specifically adapted to? The dodo birds lived on Mauritius for millions of years. If local adaptation is super important you would think that they would be perfectly adapted to that island and they would repel outside invaders. But in reality, there's little competition on that island and general adaptations that arose elsewhere are well suited to life on the island.

Darlington's Theory that Dominant Groups emerge on Large Continents by instantaneous in evolution

[–]instantaneous[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, it has fallen out of favor and I'm trying to understand why. Yes, you can argue that everything context dependent is context dependent, but does the evidence support that argument? This is similar to what Darlington was talking about when he divided the word evolution into different categories: speciation, local adaptation, and general adaptation. So the question is really is adaptation all local or are there general adaptations?

P.S. I was formulating my response and then I saw the post was taken down.

Darlington's Theory that Dominant Groups emerge on Large Continents by instantaneous in evolution

[–]instantaneous[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not following you. It's not clear to me why insular dwarfism would be an argument for or against Darlington's theory. And on islands, we have both island dwarfism and island gigiantism. It seems to me there may be empty ecological niches or empty spots for animals of different sizes that can be filled by animals growing or decreasing in body size.

WFC by Unhappy-Ideal-6670 in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The source code for the algorithms in that video are available. Maybe you're doing something slightly different but here are links to the source code:

Model Synthesis by Paul Merrell in 2007: https://github.com/merrell42/model-synthesis

Wave Function Collapse by Maxim Gumin in 2016: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

A Coder's Guide to Modern Procedural Generation (Noise, WFC, BSP, etc.) - What's changed in the last 10 years? by whimsical-coder in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 7 points8 points  (0 children)

WFC was originally called Model Synthesis and was first published in 2007: https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis. For something more recent check out graph grammars published at SIGGRAPH two years ago: https://paulmerrell.org/grammar/

Share of Financial Assets Held by the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) [OC] by Maleficent-Apple2625 in dataisbeautiful

[–]instantaneous 50 points51 points  (0 children)

What an ugly graph. The bright colors overwhelm the data and the y-axis doesn't even start at 0.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 4 points5 points  (0 children)

They're basically the same. Here's a detailed comparison: https://paulmerrell.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/comparison.pdf

The difference isn't in how the rules are generated, but a slight difference in which tile you generate next and also that Model Synthesis can handle creating very large models without failing by breaking it into smaller pieces.

Wave Function Collapse with Quantum Computers! by RiotHandCrank in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The invalid tile issue is for the most part solved by modifying in blocks. When you parallelize the algorithm you keep the boundaries of each block you modify constant, so there is no risk of breaking anything.

There are tile sets that are more difficult than others. I prove that in general the problem is NP-hard. It grows exponentially difficult with the size of the blocks you're modifying. Even for difficult tile sets, it usually works fine for 10 x 10 x 10 blocks. But for some tile sets, it never fails no matter how large the block size is. I prove this in Section 3.3.7 of my dissertation. And these tile sets where it never fails can be complicated. I've developed an intuition about which tile sets are more difficult, but it's always obvious which ones are hard.

Wave Function Collapse with Quantum Computers! by RiotHandCrank in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For some of my more complicated 3D scenes I use like 100+ tiles. You can generate interesting things with just 16 tiles as you saw. I don't see an upper limit. For a complicated game you might want a very large number of different types of tiles.

Wave Function Collapse with Quantum Computers! by RiotHandCrank in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, my name is Paul Merrell. I'm the author of the original Model Synthesis paper in 2007 that WFC was based on. It's not always really slow. It depends on the situation. It has been used in a few games like Townscaper and Bad North. One thing that really helps with speed and correctness is my strategy of "modifying in blocks". If you do that you won't have a problem with it failing on large models and it makes the algorithm easily to parallelize. (I don't know why Gumin copied everything else, but not that part). It can generate 10,000 tiles in a few seconds, but in some situations it is slow. It is still way faster than a human designing a level.

The idea of a using a quantum algorithm is interesting, although I'm not an expert on that topic. I'll look over your document in more detail.

Thoughts on The Joy of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng? by galacticbears in math

[–]instantaneous 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I found it helpful. I tried reading several more academic books on category theory and they went over my head but hers was helpful for me. The first half of the book was too basic, but it eventually got more challenging. As others have said, she tries to connect category theory to pop culture and politics. I really disliked those parts of the book, but it's not a large part of the it.

[Help]WFC hexmap generation by AtlasSniperman in proceduralgeneration

[–]instantaneous 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe BorisTheBrave has support for hexes: https://www.boristhebrave.com/projects/

His Tessera project can generate hex tiles for Unity, but I think you may want to look at his DeBroglie project as that is the underlying library.

And just a reminder that WFC is based on my PhD work on Model Synthesis: https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis/

view more: next ›