In particular, we’ve had a long running split in the computer world between “compute it” and “capture it”. In my own work in texturing, it has often come down to “generate a procedural texture” or “scan a texture image”.<\/p>\n
Yet like most dichotomies, that turns out to be a simplification. In practice, people will scan a texture image and then use that image as source material for a procedure.<\/p>\n
For example, you might use Photoshop to paint an image of “here is where the forest should go.” Then the places where you painted green will be used by a computer program to grow synthetic trees.<\/p>\n
So in the best cases it’s not really “procedure versus data,” but more “procedure using data.” Now we are just entering a new regime where this partnership is really taking off.<\/p>\n
That’s because of recent rapid advances in machine learning. The beauty of machine learning is that it builds a procedure from data. The more examples of existing data you give it, the better will be the procedure that it can build.<\/p>\n
Machine learning isn’t a panacea — it will only show answers to new things that are similar to the things you’ve already showed it. But it’s a lot better than anything we’ve had before.<\/p>\n
For solving completely new problems, we still need human brains creating procedures. Computers don’t know how to do that yet. And maybe they never will.<\/p>\n
Which may not be a bad thing. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In particular, we’ve had a long running split in the computer world between “compute it” and “capture it”. In my own work in texturing, it has often come down to “generate a procedural texture” or “scan a texture image”. Yet like most dichotomies, that turns out to be a simplification. In practice, people will scan … Continue reading “Procedure versus data, part 3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19839"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19840,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19839\/revisions\/19840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}