# Assistant conversation 35NBCV - Canonical URL: - Resource IRI: - Type: assistant conversation - Mode: chat ## Transcript ### 1. User Import the attached PDF documents. [Uploaded PDFs] - 2012-villages.pdf: Sheaf file #7S7YH6 - tarolli_2019.pdf: Sheaf file #VBBEGP - 13a James _Legacy sed _Anthropocene.pdf: Sheaf file #AB46YG ### 2. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `document_import` ```json { "action": "stage", "file_ids": [ "7S7YH6", "VBBEGP", "AB46YG" ], "name": "Import three attached PDFs" } ``` ### 3. Tool result: document_import { "status": { "counts": { "pending": 3 }, "files": [ { "error": null, "status": "pending", "file_id": "7S7YH6", "execution_id": null }, { "error": null, "status": "pending", "file_id": "AB46YG", "execution_id": null }, { "error": null, "status": "pending", "file_id": "VBBEGP", "execution_id": null } ] }, "sources": [], "action": "stage", "run_id": "MQ3XLF", "file_ids": [ "7S7YH6", "VBBEGP", "AB46YG" ], "run_iri": "https://m.sheaf.less.rest/MQ3XLF" } ### 4. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `document_import` ```json { "action": "extract", "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ``` ### 5. Tool result: document_import { "status": { "counts": { "completed": 3 }, "files": [ { "error": null, "status": "completed", "file_id": "7S7YH6", "execution_id": "pex_oD4SDRtGs_5o" }, { "error": null, "status": "completed", "file_id": "AB46YG", "execution_id": "pex_spaQvwiP2Wlb" }, { "error": null, "status": "completed", "file_id": "VBBEGP", "execution_id": "pex_BFTJ15DykD3b" } ] }, "action": "extract", "completed": 1, "run_id": "MQ3XLF", "submitted": 3 } ### 6. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `document_import` ```json { "action": "inspect", "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ``` ### 7. Tool result: document_import { "status": { "counts": { "completed": 3 }, "files": [ { "error": null, "status": "completed", "file_id": "7S7YH6", "execution_id": "pex_oD4SDRtGs_5o" }, { "error": null, "status": "completed", "file_id": "AB46YG", "execution_id": "pex_spaQvwiP2Wlb" }, { "error": null, "status": "completed", "file_id": "VBBEGP", "execution_id": "pex_BFTJ15DykD3b" } ] }, "action": "inspect", "run_id": "MQ3XLF", "files": [ { "status": "completed", "file_id": "7S7YH6", "quality": { "blocks": 168, "pages": 10, "math_expressions": 119, "equation_blocks": 6, "pages_with_math": 7, "empty_equation_blocks": 0, "page_continuations": 3, "block_types": { "Caption": 16, "Equation": 6, "Figure": 3, "Footnote": 1, "ListGroup": 2, "PageHeader": 19, "Picture": 17, "SectionHeader": 21, "Table": 1, "Text": 82 } }, "output_path": "/home/mbrock/sheaf.mikael/var/datalab/MQ3XLF/7S7YH6.datalab.json" }, { "status": "completed", "file_id": "AB46YG", "quality": { "blocks": 151, "pages": 11, "math_expressions": 37, "equation_blocks": 2, "pages_with_math": 4, "empty_equation_blocks": 0, "page_continuations": 3, "block_types": { "Caption": 10, "Equation": 2, "Figure": 4, "Footnote": 3, "ListGroup": 5, "PageFooter": 2, "PageHeader": 24, "Picture": 6, "SectionHeader": 20, "Table": 1, "Text": 74 } }, "output_path": "/home/mbrock/sheaf.mikael/var/datalab/MQ3XLF/AB46YG.datalab.json" }, { "status": "completed", "file_id": "VBBEGP", "quality": { "blocks": 240, "pages": 34, "math_expressions": 4, "equation_blocks": 0, "pages_with_math": 3, "empty_equation_blocks": 0, "page_continuations": 15, "block_types": { "Caption": 10, "Figure": 8, "ListGroup": 10, "PageHeader": 68, "Picture": 3, "SectionHeader": 31, "Table": 1, "Text": 109 } }, "output_path": "/home/mbrock/sheaf.mikael/var/datalab/MQ3XLF/VBBEGP.datalab.json" } ] } ### 8. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `document_import` ```json { "action": "import", "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ``` ### 9. Tool result: document_import { "next": "Resolve metadata, rebuild indexes, and validate reader pages.", "action": "import", "documents": [ { "status": "imported", "title": null, "file_id": "7S7YH6", "document_id": "EARFEK", "document_iri": "https://m.sheaf.less.rest/EARFEK" }, { "status": "imported", "title": null, "file_id": "AB46YG", "document_id": "K82AS7", "document_iri": "https://m.sheaf.less.rest/K82AS7" }, { "status": "imported", "title": null, "file_id": "VBBEGP", "document_id": "2284QZ", "document_iri": "https://m.sheaf.less.rest/2284QZ" } ], "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ### 10. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `document_import` ```json { "action": "metadata", "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ``` ### 11. Tool result: document_import { "action": "metadata", "documents": [ { "error": "%{status: 404, body: \"Resource not found.\"}", "document_id": "EARFEK" }, { "match": { "reason": "title match accepted for Crossref type journal-article", "source": "doi", "identifier": "10.1016/j.ancene.2013.04.001", "score": 1.0, "doi": "10.1016/j.ancene.2013.04.001", "accept?": true, "crossref_title": "Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment", "crossref_type": "journal-article" }, "metadata": { "title": "Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment", "usage": { "cost": { "total": 6.54e-4, "tokens": 6.54e-4, "tools": 0.0, "storage": 0.0, "images": 0.0, "input_cost": 4.5e-4, "output_cost": 2.04e-4, "reasoning_cost": 0.0, "line_items": [ { "count": 1801, "id": "token.input", "kind": "tokens", "component": "token.input", "cost": 4.5e-4, "quantity": 1801 }, { "count": 136, "id": "token.output", "kind": "tokens", "component": "token.output", "cost": 2.04e-4, "quantity": 136 } ] }, "output_tokens": 136, "input_tokens": 1801, "total_cost": 6.54e-4, "reasoning_tokens": 0, "input_cost": 4.5e-4, "output_cost": 2.04e-4, "reasoning_cost": 0.0, "cached_tokens": 0, "total_tokens": 1937, "tool_usage": {}, "image_usage": {}, "cache_creation_tokens": 0 }, "year": "2013", "model": "google:gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview", "notes": null, "issue": null, "pages": "16-26", "authors": [ "L. Allan James" ], "doi": "10.1016/j.ancene.2013.04.001", "volume": "2", "isbn": null, "publication": "Anthropocene", "confidence": "high", "source_filename": "78643a6db84878fd865069cf3ea6f46cb6e72884c9d859cf1992f4f90cb11b31.pdf" }, "document_id": "K82AS7", "wrote": true }, { "match": { "reason": "title match accepted for Crossref type journal-article", "source": "doi", "identifier": "10.1177/0309133318825284", "score": 1.0, "doi": "10.1177/0309133318825284", "accept?": true, "crossref_title": "From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology", "crossref_type": "journal-article" }, "metadata": { "title": "From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology", "usage": { "cost": { "total": 0.001224, "tokens": 0.001224, "tools": 0.0, "storage": 0.0, "images": 0.0, "input_cost": 9.64e-4, "output_cost": 2.6e-4, "reasoning_cost": 0.0, "line_items": [ { "count": 3857, "id": "token.input", "kind": "tokens", "component": "token.input", "cost": 9.64e-4, "quantity": 3857 }, { "count": 173, "id": "token.output", "kind": "tokens", "component": "token.output", "cost": 2.6e-4, "quantity": 173 } ] }, "output_tokens": 173, "input_tokens": 3857, "total_cost": 0.001224, "reasoning_tokens": 0, "input_cost": 9.64e-4, "output_cost": 2.6e-4, "reasoning_cost": 0.0, "cached_tokens": 0, "total_tokens": 4030, "tool_usage": {}, "image_usage": {}, "cache_creation_tokens": 0 }, "year": "2019", "model": "google:gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview", "notes": null, "issue": "1", "pages": "95–128", "authors": [ "Paolo Tarolli", "Wenfang Cao", "Giulia Sofia", "Damian Evans", "Erle C Ellis" ], "doi": "10.1177/0309133318825284", "volume": "43", "isbn": null, "publication": "Progress in Physical Geography", "confidence": "high", "source_filename": null }, "document_id": "2284QZ", "wrote": true } ], "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ### 12. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "EARFEK" } ``` ### 13. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #EARFEK Title: Untitled thesis Outline: - 1 #PEJ7QK Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains - 1.1 #267TWW 1 Introduction - 1.2 #L3ZR4Y 2 Related work - 1.3 #3V5J62 3 Overview and Notations - 1.4 #NGENF9 4 Growth of a village skeleton - 1.4.1 #BAWCC2 4.1 Growth scenario - 1.4.2 #A25QY5 4.2 Building seeding - 1.4.3 #9BNTJC 4.3 Connection to the road network - 1.5 #2UHSWB 5 Land parcels generation - 1.5.1 #DDU7AM 5.1 Road conquest - 1.5.2 #2RAM5G 5.2 Corner conquest - 1.5.3 #ZHTKNS 5.3 Anisotropic land conquest - 1.5.4 #L8N2NE 5.4 Parcels simplification - 1.5.5 #Z4KQJJ 5.5 Building footprints computation - 1.6 #W43RWS 6 Geometry generation - 1.6.1 #PVBHHL 6.1 Open shape grammar - 1.6.2 #H7KQN8 6.2 Geometry generation algorithm - 1.7 #7MTUXN 7 Results - 1.8 #Z6JU3C 8 Conclusion - 1.9 #PMU6Z6 References - 1.10 #S7RURD Appendix A: Example of Open Shape Grammar rules ### 14. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "PEJ7QK" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 15. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #EARFEK Untitled thesis SECTION #PEJ7QK Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains EXCERPT #TZLVFV p. 0 Arnaud Emilien · Adrien Bernhardt · Adrien Peytavie Marie-Paule Cani · Eric Galin EXCERPT #L9CMJ6 p. 0 Published online: 18 April 2012 ©Springer-Verlag 2012 EXCERPT #SVYZ4U p. 0 Abstract Although procedural modeling of cities has attracted a lot of attention for the past decade, populating arbitrary landscapes with non-urban settlements remains an open problem. In this work, we focus on the modeling of small, European villages that took benefit of terrain features to settle in safe, sunny or simply convenient places. We introduce a three step procedural generation method. First, an iterative process based on interest maps is used to progressively generate settlement seeds and the roads that connect them. The fact that a new road attracts settlers while a new house often leads to some extension of the road network is taken into account. Then, an anisotropic conquest method is introduced to segment the land into parcels around settlement seeds. Finally, we introduce open shape grammar to generate 3D geometry that adapts to the local slope. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by generating different kinds of villages on arbitrary terrains, from a mountain hamlet to a fisherman village, and validate through comparison with real data. EXCERPT #RWNN9D p. 0 Keywords Procedural generation · Open Shape Grammars · Villages · 3D modeling EXCERPT #JY2YK3 p. 0 A 3D rendering of a highland settlement generated by the system. The scene shows a small village with several houses and a church spire, nestled in a valley between rolling hills. The terrain is covered in green grass and some trees. The sky is a soft, hazy blue, suggesting a dawn or dusk setting. The perspective is from a slightly elevated position, looking down into the valley. EXCERPT #5F7HUT p. 0 Fig. 1 A highland settlement generated by our system SECTION #267TWW 1 Introduction EXCERPT #2YYFGG p. 0 Offering the richest possible user experience in flight simulators, video games and 3D movies, requires the creation of an increasing amount of complex, textured 3D models. Modeling a large number of these by hand using standard software is a tedious task. This is especially true for landscapes, which should ideally combine arbitrary terrains with rivers, lakes, forests, and adapted human settlement. Several procedural modeling techniques have been developed to automatically generate such complex content. However, the modeling of human settlement has been restricted, up to now, to the generation of large cities, where building blocks are used to populate regular street networks. Adaptation to rough terrain has been scarcely studied, and no previous work was conducted, to our knowledge, on the generation sparser settlements. EXCERPT #ZAA6EC p. 0 This paper addresses the procedural modeling of small villages on arbitrary terrains, where bodies of water have possibly been predefined. Our method generates all the elements defining a village, from the road network to the individual parcels of land and to 3D houses adapted to the local slope. EXCERPT #CXBYFE p. 0 Arnaud Emilien · Adrien Bernhardt · Marie-Paule Cani E-mail: firstname.surname@inria.fr LJK (U. Grenoble, CNRS) and Inria, Grenoble, France Adrien Peytavie E-mail: adrien.peytavie@liris.cnrs.fr Université Lyon 1, LIRIS, UMR5205, F-69622, France Eric Galin E-mail: eric.galin@liris.cnrs.fr Université Lyon 2, LIRIS, UMR5205, F-69622, France EXCERPT #N8VWJW p. 1 EXCERPT #U7QSTW p. 1 EXCERPT #Z9XMNA p. 1 Contrary to the large cities usually studied in Computer Graphics, most human settlements did not result from some pre-defined land-use plan, but from people progressively settling in safe, well served, sunny or convenient location for farming or fishing. Meanwhile, the road networks progressively grew and in turn attracted new settlers [2]. The result of such progressive settlement can still be observed in many regions over the world. For instance, it is the cause of the unique look of typical highland hamlets in the European Alps or of ancient villages on the banks of the Mediterranean Sea. Generating scattered settlements is a challenging problem that requires stepping away from the standard modeling paradigm used for cities [15]. In addition, modeling villages on hilly terrains requires generating complex land parcels, driven by both curved roads and un-even terrain slopes, and houses with non-regular doors and windows positions. EXCERPT #2H4TL6 p. 1 Our main contributions are as follows. First, we propose a new, hybrid settlement/road generation process that progressively creates a village layout on arbitrary terrain based on a growth scenario and on dynamic interest maps (Section 4). Secondly, we introduce an anisotropic conquest process that creates plausible individual parcels of land (Section 5). Finally, we present an open shape grammar able to adapt the geometry of houses to the local terrain slope (Section 6). Our method is illustrated by the generation of a variety of typical villages, validated through comparison with real layouts and pictures (Section 7). SECTION #L3ZR4Y 2 Related work EXCERPT #7MCHUW p. 1 Generating villages requires the generation of road networks, land tessellation into parcels and the creation of 3D buildings. This section reviews previous work in these domains. A complete survey on procedural city modeling can be found in [17]. EXCERPT #RWTR2S p. 1 Road networks Several interactive techniques have been introduced for editing or sketching road networks on arbitrary terrains. Roads were either represented by Bezier curves [3], or by clothoids enabling to express curvature constraints [12]. Closer to our concerns, automatic generation of roads on rough terrains was addressed by Galin [7,6]. Finding a path from a starting point to an end point subject to maximal slope and curvature constraints was expressed as an anisotropic shortest path problem. It enabled to take into account the environment, such as the presence of vegetation or water. Our method extends this approach to the case of road networks between hamlets or houses, leading us to a new, road re-use strategy. EXCERPT #57ZLSQ p. 1 Procedural modeling of cities Existing methods for modeling cities start by generating a street network. The cycles formed by neighboring streets are tessellated into blocks serving as footprints for buildings. Inspired from L-Systems [14], Parish pioneer work for street network generation was fully automatic [15]. User control through interactive editing was later allowed [9,11]. In parallel, other approaches were introduced such as tensor fields based or example-based city layout generation [4, 1]. Those methods first define the road network and then create the parcels in a second step. Therefore, they cannot be applied in the case of scattered settlement, where modeling the interaction between progressive settlement and road network extension is mandatory. Although not addressing the same problem, our progressive generation approach is closer to resource management methods introduced to simulate city growth or optimize land use [18,16]. EXCERPT #QQ2NT2 p. 1 When a city layout defining footprints for buildings is set, grammars such as L-Systems [15], split grammars [19] or shape grammars [13] are used for automatically generating their geometry. Our method for generating houses on hilly terrains extends existing grammar-based approaches: we define an open shape grammar enabling façade elements to self adapt to external constraints. EXCERPT #3DL6KL p. 1 Non-urban settlements To our knowledge, the only work addressing the generation of non-urban settlements was dedicated to South African informal settlements [8]. After using a particle system to generate settlement seeds, different combinations of Voronoi diagrams were used to tessellate the terrain. This inspired our work on land parcels generation, although we had to develop a new, anisotropic land conquest method to account for alignments with road paths and terrain features, observed on real village layouts. EXCERPT #QZMNWZ p. 1 Lastly, progressive growth of non-urban settlements based on environmental constraints is somewhat similar to the spread of biological species. Inspiring from a model for lichen spreading on a support [5], we rely on particles to progressively seed settlement based on interest maps. However, villages develop in more structured ways, requiring us to take the road network into account in the simulation loop. SECTION #3V5J62 3 Overview and Notations EXCERPT #DJMMZT p. 1 In this work, we call village any non-urban, sparse settlement, for instance a group of terraced houses around a church, a couple of remote hamlets and a few isolated farms between them. We define the region of interest on which the village is to be created as a compact \Omega \in \mathbb{R}^2 . \Omega is supposed to be connected to the outside world through a set of connection points \Psi , located at the edges of \Omega , and that will serve as extremities for the future road network. The nature of the environment is pre-defined using functions over \Omega . h(\mathbf{p}) , w(\mathbf{p}) and v(\mathbf{p}) respectively denote the elevation, the water height and the vegetation density at a given point \mathbf{p} . EXCERPT #V7KS9W p. 2 EXCERPT #LRYGRD p. 2 EXCERPT #SLSQBF p. 2 Figure 2: Overview of the village generation method. It shows four stages: 1) A raw input terrain map. 2) The terrain with a network of yellow lines representing the village skeleton (roads and settlement seeds). 3) The skeleton with green rectangular outlines representing added land parcels. 4) The final 3D rendered village with houses and terrain shading. EXCERPT #C6TAYH p. 2 Fig. 2 Overview of our method: given an input terrain, we first generate the skeleton of the village (roads and settlement seeds), then we add parcels to the village layout, and finally generate 3D geometry for houses. EXCERPT #DQVAZE p. 2 To enable the creation on the same terrain, of various villages, we use a village type \mathcal{V} (e.g. high-land settlement, defensive village, fisherman village). A growth scenario sets \mathcal{V} over time and launches the creation of settlement seeds B_i – marking the future locations of buildings, and of the roads R_j that serve them. We call Village Skeleton \mathcal{S} = (\{B_i\}, \{R_j\}) the result of this step. A settlement seed is defined as B_i = (\mathcal{B}, \mathbf{p}) , where \mathcal{B} is the building type (e.g. castle, church, terraced house or farm), and \mathbf{p} \in \Omega is a position. A road R_j is defined by a set of nodes positions \{\mathbf{p}_k\} controlling its central curve. During the generation process, we call building encyclopedia a function that returns, for each pair (\mathcal{V}, \mathcal{B}) , the set of parameters used to seed a building. EXCERPT #LDSAYC p. 2 The village layout we need to compute is not only composed of the village skeleton, but also includes a tessellation of \Omega into individual land parcels \mathcal{P}_i around buildings. We call F_i the footprint of the building B_i , defined as a sub-part of \mathcal{P}_i . This footprint will serve as foundation for the geometry of the building. EXCERPT #4J2JH4 p. 2 Our algorithm for generating villages on arbitrary terrains is summarized in Figure 2. Given \Omega , a few environment maps and a user-defined growth scenario, we first grow the village skeleton, then generate land parcels and building footprints to get the village layout, and finally create 3D geometry. These three steps are detailed in Sections 4 to 6. SECTION #NGENF9 4 Growth of a village skeleton EXCERPT #BUHDXU p. 2 In this section, we explain how we generate the building seeds and the road network that form the village skeleton. We use an iterative particle-based method for seeding buildings while considering environmental constraints and interest functions depending on the building type. The key feature of our simulation loop is to EXCERPT #2LHPV2 p. 2 alternate seeding steps with creation of road segments connecting newly created buildings to the network (Figure 3). This approach allows for dynamic update of interest regions when new roads are created. EXCERPT #4G5F7G p. 2 graph TD Env[Environment] --> Loop Scenario[Scenario] --> Loop subgraph Loop direction TB Seeding[Village Element Seeding Process] --> Road[Road Creation Process] Road --> Seeding end Loop --> Skeleton[Village Skeleton] Figure 3: Algorithm for the village skeleton growth. The flowchart shows 'Environment' and 'Scenario' inputs feeding into a loop between 'Village Element Seeding Process' and 'Road Creation Process'. The output of the loop is the 'Village Skeleton'. EXCERPT #8KWKYJ p. 2 Fig. 3 Algorithm for the village skeleton growth. SECTION #BAWCC2 4.1 Growth scenario EXCERPT #W9RBYW p. 2 The growth scenario allows the user to control the evolution of a village by defining a list of temporal events which can either be a change of village type or the seeding of several buildings of a given type. EXCERPT #4VZ57G p. 2 Change of village type The village type \mathcal{V} sets some of the parameters used for seeding buildings, and thus affects the way a village will grow. Modeling a change of the environment or a change of the population needs over time is done by changing the village type. For instance, we can simulate a peaceful period following war by first choosing a defensive village type, followed by a prosperous, farming type. EXCERPT #PU8QMD p. 2 Generation of building lots A vast majority of events in the growth scenario concern the creation of n buildings of a given type \mathcal{B} . During the execution of the scenario, the creation of a new building seed is immediately followed by its connection to the road network. SECTION #A25QY5 4.2 Building seeding EXCERPT #KCEEC5 p. 2 The way human settlements spread over a terrain is somewhat similar to the growth of natural species. EXCERPT #EGY6H8 p. 3 EXCERPT #HSMVY4 p. 3 EXCERPT #U8FZYL p. 3 Figure 4: Four graphs showing interest functions. 1. Attraction-repulsion: A bell-shaped curve peaking at lambda_0, with lambda_min on the left and lambda_max on the right. 2. Balance: A bell-shaped curve peaking at lambda_0, with lambda_min on the left and lambda_max on the right. 3. Close distance: A decreasing curve starting at 1 for lambda_min and approaching -1 for lambda_max. 4. Open distance: An increasing curve starting at -1 for lambda_min and approaching 1 for lambda_max. EXCERPT #C44TYU p. 3 Fig. 4 Functions used to compute interests. From left to right: Attraction-repulsion function (sociability and worship), balance function (roads and slope), close distance function (water), open distance function (fortifications). EXCERPT #JN96HE p. 3 Our approach resembles the Open Diffuse Limited Aggregation model presented in [5] and adapts it in several original ways. Instead of moving particles over the land randomly to set the location of a new building, we rely on a stochastic positioning process followed by a local interest-based aggregation. EXCERPT #3ZDAVW p. 3 Seeding algorithm A position \mathbf{p} for the building B to be positioned is randomly selected, and the conditions for constructing at \mathbf{p} are checked (for instance, a farm cannot be built in the middle of a lake). If construction is possible, we compute a local interest value \mathcal{I}(B) that measures the advantage for the building to be at its current location. The parameters of the interest function, extracted from the building encyclopedia, depend on the village and building types. Then, we perform a random choice, called the aggregation test , for deciding whether the position \mathbf{p} should be kept or not for B , with a probability of success depending on \mathcal{I}(B) . In case of failure, we randomly select a new position and iterate the process until a good position is found. EXCERPT #P6XUT4 p. 3 Interest function When a building B = (\mathcal{B}, \mathbf{p}) tries to seed at a given location, we need to analyze the interest of this location in a consistent manner, while taking the village and building types into account and checking constructibility conditions. This is done by combining, with coefficients depending on the village and building types, n independent functions f_i(B) \in [-1, 1] representing different interest criteria. A negative value is given if the location is undesired ( -1 if impossible), while a positive value indicates a positive evaluation of the criterion at \mathbf{p} . The combination is controlled by the building encyclopedia, where a set of n weighing factors \{w_i\} is predefined for each couple (\mathcal{V}, \mathcal{B}) . The interest function is then given by: EXCERPT #6T5LMC p. 3 \mathcal{I}(B) \begin{cases} 0 & \text{if } \exists i \text{ such that } f_i(B) = -1 \\ \max(0, \sum w_i f_i(B)) & \text{in the other cases.} \end{cases} EXCERPT #H7HDT5 p. 3 This method is general: it can combine a variety of criteria according to the desired result. We list below a few relevant functions for f_i (Figure 4). Some of them, stored as static 2D maps, are pre-computed before village generation starts. Others, such as sociability and EXCERPT #W9J2A5 p. 3 accessibility, are dynamically updated when a new building (resp. road) is created. The values of these interest functions can be displayed on the ground by the user using a color-map based visualization, as shown in Figure 5. EXCERPT #F35XBW p. 3 Sociability This criterion measures the interest of buildings to be clustered. Since being too close to a neighbor is generally less attractive than being at a short distance, we thus use a sum of attraction-repulsion functions f_{att}(d) where d is the distance between B and the surrounding buildings. The parameters \lambda_{min}, \lambda_0 and \lambda_{max} are predefined for each couple of building types, and stored in the building encyclopedia. This enables us to set distinct preferred distances values between terraced houses and between farms. EXCERPT #N9CNZB p. 3 Worship This function models the attraction of houses to religious elements such as temples, churches, statues, or monasteries. These elements, often at the very center of villages, are those around which the houses were initially constructed. We use the same kind of attraction function than for sociability, but computed only for the surrounding buildings of religious type. EXCERPT #NSE34L p. 3 Accessibility This function expresses both that building close to an existing road is easier, and that settlers usually prefer to create their house in a well served place. We use a non-symmetric bell-shaped function (Figure 4) of the distance d to the closest road. The parameters \lambda_0 (preferred distance to a road) and \lambda_{min}, \lambda_{max} (defining the interval outside which construction is prohibited), depend on the building type. EXCERPT #TAV8NX p. 3 Slope We use a bell-shaped function depending on building type to express preference to a given slope value, and to prohibit construction outside of a given slope range. This can be used to attract corn farms to flat areas and vineyards to hills. EXCERPT #AUERMW p. 3 Water Being able to attract houses to the sea shore, a lake or a river is important. We use a close distance function (Figure 4), a decreasing function of distance to the nearest water body. Minimum and maximum distances \lambda_{min} and \lambda_{max} depend on the building type. EXCERPT #QGHJ8F p. 4 EXCERPT #9FUYD5 p. 4 EXCERPT #HBQMU7 p. 4 Figure 5: Visualization of interest maps for the village type V = fortified and the building type B = house. The figure consists of eight sub-images arranged in a 4x2 grid. The left column shows topographic maps (satellite and elevation) and accessibility maps (heatmaps). The right column shows the current village skeleton (road network) and maps for sociability, fortification, and worship. A color bar at the bottom indicates values from -1 (blue) to 1 (red). EXCERPT #UUF5QP p. 4 Fig. 5 Visualization of interest maps for the village type V = fortified and the building type B = house. Current village, current village skeleton, geographical domination, slope, accessibility, sociability, fortification, worship. EXCERPT #Z637BR p. 4 Fortification During wartime, building within a fortification or close enough to a castle, is important for houses. This interest is computed using an open distance function (Figure 4) (with \lambda_{min} = 0 ), a decreasing function of the shortest distance to the nearest fortified enclosure. f_{open} is equal to 1 inside fortifications. EXCERPT #UTMFRS p. 4 Geographical domination Either an indicator of social superiority or as necessity for defense, being at a higher spot than surrounding buildings is important factor. Churches and monasteries are often built in overlooking places so that they can be seen from afar. The importance of height decreases with the distance to the point of interest. We use the following function: EXCERPT #TJJ6LQ p. 4 f(\mathbf{x}) = \sum_{\mathbf{p} \parallel \|\mathbf{x} - \mathbf{p}\| < r} \frac{h(\mathbf{x}) - h(\mathbf{p})}{1 + \|\mathbf{x} - \mathbf{p}\|^2} EXCERPT #XL3MU3 p. 4 \mathbf{p} denotes sample points on the terrain, \|\mathbf{x} - \mathbf{p}\| the Euclidean distance between \mathbf{p} and \mathbf{x} , r the influence radius and h(\mathbf{p}) the height of the terrain at \mathbf{p} . SECTION #9BNTJC 4.3 Connection to the road network EXCERPT #H9XK9Q p. 4 For the accessibility criteria to be correctly updated, we need to create the roads that connect a new building to the network just after placing the later. EXCERPT #KMU3GV p. 4 Road construction We use a shortest path algorithm similar to the one in [7] to connect every new building to \Psi , the set of predefined connections to the outside world. The construction cost of a road is the sum of the costs of its road segments R , expressed as a weighted sum of different cost functions g_i : EXCERPT #X64BNH p. 4 \mathcal{C}(R) = \sum_{j=0}^m w_j \cdot g_j(R) EXCERPT #RVMFRF p. 4 In addition to slope, curvature and water costs, we use another function g expressing the cost for a road segment of crossing an existing building. This cost is set to a high constant to prevent collisions. To prevent the method from generating a fully ramified road networks, we note that, as in real life, the less costly connection to the existing network should be looked for (road re-use coming for free). This is modeled by introducing a new re-use weight w_{ex} \ll 1 , used to reduce the cost of traversing existing road segments: EXCERPT #7ZLDD3 p. 4 \mathcal{C}'(\mathcal{R}) = \begin{cases} w_{ex} \mathcal{C}(R) & \text{if } R \text{ belongs to a road} \\ \mathcal{C}(\mathcal{R}) & \text{otherwise} \end{cases} EXCERPT #M88TWJ p. 4 This way, a new segment is correctly connected to the network, as illustrated in Figure 6. EXCERPT #JF9DFL p. 4 Road cycles Real road networks often include cycles providing shortcuts. We thus add a cycle construction step (Figure 6). Once a first road to a new building is computed, we try to extend it by looking for the closest road node p in a cone of angle \theta from B , centered on the current road direction. We then use of usual method for generating a road between B and p . This road is created, leading to a new cycle, whenever it is not too close to the other road serving B (the later may occur due to slope constraints forcing roads to turn around obstacles). SECTION #2UHSWB 5 Land parcels generation EXCERPT #35WZMP p. 4 Computing a village skeleton (roads trajectories and building seeds) is not sufficient for generating the layout of a village: we also need to tessellate the terrain into individual parcels of land, where houses, gardens or fields will be defined. A first approach, investigated in [8], is to rely on Voronoi diagrams to define a parcel of land around each building seed. This approach leads to rather isotropic parcels that lack structure and are not aligned with roads. EXCERPT #B3SWSM p. 4 After carefully analyzing the layout of parcels in real villages, we observed that most parcels have one side neighboring a road and two sides perpendicular to it, the shape of the last side being driven by other constraints such as the presence of neighbors or large changes in terrain slope. Therefore, we rely on a three steps, anisotropic land conquest method to define adapted land parcels. First seeds conquer their road territory. Then, they expand from the road using anisotropic conquest. Lastly, the resulting parcel is simplified to avoid sharp angles (Figure 7). EXCERPT #F6YNNV p. 5 EXCERPT #N9J57Z p. 5 EXCERPT #4UKWCK p. 5 Figure 6: Three 3D terrain renderings showing the process of creating new roads. The first image shows a road network on a terrain without re-use. The second image shows the same terrain with road re-use, where existing roads are integrated into the new network. The third image shows the terrain with road cycle generation, where new roads are added to form closed loops. EXCERPT #FXLVS3 p. 5 Fig. 6 Creating new roads. From left to right: without and with road re-use, with road cycle generation. SECTION #DDU7AM 5.1 Road conquest EXCERPT #PBKC2T p. 5 Since each building seed is served by roads, we first define the part of the roads belonging to each parcel (Figure 7). Let the source point S_i of parcel P_i be the projections of B_i on the closest road. We perform the road conquest by propagating P_i on both sides of S_i along the road, until collision with a neighboring parcel or until a maximum distance from S_i is reached. SECTION #2RAM5G 5.2 Corner conquest EXCERPT #SWN7G2 p. 5 When two building are at the same distance from a junction, road conquest leads to a collision at the angle, resulting into non-plausible land parcels with sharp angles (Figure 8). Observing from real layouts that land at a corner between two roads generally belongs to a single owner, we use a corner conquest pass to resolve these conflicts: we allow the parcel P_i arrived first at a junction to annex a part of its neighborhood. Building seeds that lose access to roads are suppressed. EXCERPT #7UUY3Z p. 5 Figure 7: A sequence of six diagrams illustrating the land parcels generation algorithm. 1. Village skeleton: A network of roads on a grid. 2. Road conquest: Roads are colored to show territory. 3. Corner conquest: Sharp angles at junctions are resolved. 4. Region conquest: Territories are further refined. 5. Parcel simplification: Sharp angles are smoothed out. 6. Building generation: Final parcels with buildings. EXCERPT #2AU3FS p. 5 Fig. 7 Land parcels generation algorithm. From left to right: village skeleton, road conquest, corner conquest, region conquest, parcel simplification, building generation. EXCERPT #3A9FZ2 p. 5 Figure 8: Two diagrams comparing corner conquest. The left diagram shows a junction where two roads meet, and parcels from both sides have sharp angles at the corner. The right diagram shows the result after corner conquest, where the corner is smoothed out and belongs to a single parcel. EXCERPT #Y4JRGS p. 5 Fig. 8 Without (left) and with (right) corner conquest pass. SECTION #ZHTKNS 5.3 Anisotropic land conquest EXCERPT #XRFJJV p. 5 Once building seeds own parts of the roads, their land parcel is grown using grid-based propagation. Each road cell belonging to P_i is marked in the grid as a source S , and each of these sources is associated a fund c_{\max} . Then the sources iteratively spread. The process stops when the total cost of conquest from S reaches c_{\max} . EXCERPT #7NDG5K p. 5 In general, land parcels are orthogonal to the road, with a shape depending on other constraints such as slope. We thus use an anisotropic function to model spreading cost. The cost dc_s for conquering a non-occupied cell d_s is set to: EXCERPT #RXNVGA p. 5 dc_s(d_s, \mathbf{n}) = \sum_{i=0}^{n-1} \omega_i c_i(d_s, \mathbf{n}) EXCERPT #FEFVGW p. 5 where c_i are independent cost functions modeling external constraints, all depending on the conquest direction \mathbf{n} , defined as the normal to the road at the source. The weights \omega_i , set through the building encyclopedia, depend on the village and building types (\mathcal{V}, \mathcal{B}) . They enable us to ensure, for instance, that a castle or a farm will get more land than a terraced house. We present below several useful cost functions. EXCERPT #BL7KZ7 p. 5 Conquest cost This cost is set to the distance from the current cell to the source S . We use the Euclidean distance for farming fields, and the infinite distance d(\mathbf{p}, \mathbf{n}, \mathbf{t}) = |\max(\mathbf{p} \cdot \mathbf{n}, \mathbf{p} \cdot \mathbf{t})| for the houses and villas, to get quasi-quadrilateral parcels for them. EXCERPT #NV2SQZ p. 5 Water, wall and road cost The conquest cost for water, wall or roads cells is +\infty . This allows us to constraint the parcel shape with the road curvature, and to prevent the parcel to cross a wall or water bodies. EXCERPT #QFQ2L6 p. 6 EXCERPT #SY2J2C p. 6 EXCERPT #DZABMM p. 6 Slope cost As observed in real village layouts, the shape of land parcels (especially those with fields) is sensible to local slope, almost enabling to guess the main terrain features from them. We model this using an anisotropic cost function, for which spread in the main slope direction is difficult. Slope cost is computed as a quadratic function of the directional gradient of the terrain height, to reduce the influence of little slope variations and increase those of bigger ones. SECTION #L8N2NE 5.4 Parcels simplification EXCERPT #XWV896 p. 6 Once the grid cells belonging to P_i are computed, we extract a poly-line representing its contour. Meanwhile, the shape of P_i is simplified, to account for the fact that even in small villages, parcel boundaries mainly consist of straight lines. This simplification is done in two steps, inspired from mesh simplification methods: EXCERPT #LT6VEP p. 6 First, we remove vertices that have a little influence on the contour shape. Let e_0 = (\mathbf{p}_0, \mathbf{p}_1) and e_1 = (\mathbf{p}_1, \mathbf{p}_2) denote two edges. If the angle \angle(\mathbf{n}_0, \mathbf{n}_1) , where \mathbf{n}_0 = \mathbf{p}_1 - \mathbf{p}_0 and \mathbf{n}_1 = \mathbf{p}_2 - \mathbf{p}_1 , is lower than a constant threshold \epsilon we replace the two edges by e_2 = (\mathbf{p}_0, \mathbf{p}_2) . In the second step, we removing non-plausible acute angles that appear at some T-vertices of the parcel boundary mesh (Figure 7). SECTION #Z4KQJJ 5.5 Building footprints computation EXCERPT #UENNZW p. 6 Because it is the most frequently observed shape for buildings (Figure 12), we decided to illustrate our method with only quadrilateral footprints for houses and villas. We initialize a quad in each parcel, at the closest position to the road, and oriented according to the closest normal to the road. The quad grows until it either reaches the maximal size for its building type, or collides with the contour of the parcel. If one of the segments is close to the contour, its vertices are projected onto it, enabling the generation of terraced houses when several neighboring houses use this strategy. SECTION #W43RWS 6 Geometry generation EXCERPT #7JG8GA p. 6 The final step of our method is the creation of the three-dimensional geometry of the village, including roads, buildings and vegetation. While existing methods such as [7] can be used to generate accurate road geometry, existing methods for generating houses from their footprint [10] need to be extended to allow the generation of plausible houses on hilly terrain. In small mountain villages, windows and doors often have unusual shapes EXCERPT #XZJ6NL p. 6 and façades often have complex layouts so as to conform to architectural constraints such as non-collision with the ground, alignment with floors whenever possible, and guaranteeing at least a door and a window per room. In this section, we introduce Open Shape Grammar to adapt geometry generation to such constraints. SECTION #PVBHHL 6.1 Open shape grammar EXCERPT #AZNR6R p. 6 We extend the concept of CGA shape grammar rules [13] by enabling the on the flight adaptation of newly created façade elements so that various plausibility constraints are met. In our work, this process is implemented for doors, windows and stairs. EXCERPT #68ZUQR p. 6 We define an Open Shape Grammar as a grammar where the application of a selected rule can be canceled if some external constraints are not met, such as non-collision with the ground or with other buildings. Open Shape Grammar rules also incorporate adaptation mechanisms: each rule selection yields a series of attempts to create the output shape according to constraints of the environment. The element is created (and then the rule outputs success) as soon as a valid configuration is found. The application of the rule is canceled (and it outputs failure) if a maximum number of attempts is reached, and all have failed. See Appendix A for an example of Open Shape Grammar rule, showing the compatibility with standard grammars. SECTION #H7KQN8 6.2 Geometry generation algorithm EXCERPT #R6JM2R p. 6 The geometry of a building is generated from the building footprint using a standard method [13]: first we generate the floors and the roof, then we add façade elements, such as doors and windows. The latter is done using an open shape grammar, with the two kinds of adaptations detailed below. EXCERPT #3UURQM p. 6 Position adaptation Each element is first positioned at the most plausible location: aligned with a floor and centered on the wall for a window; centered horizontally on the first floor for a door. Next, we move the element on the wall surface with a displacement cost kernel K until the element has a valid position (Figure 10). The kernel enables us to set preferences on the correction direction, such as favoring horizontal displacements over vertical ones. EXCERPT #6ECHXG p. 6 Let \mathbf{p} be the position of the element on the surface and c(\mathbf{p}) its cost. If the position is not valid, the unexplored neighborhood of the current position \mathbf{p} is added to a priority queue with a cost equal to K(dx, dy) + c(\mathbf{p}) . The position of lower cost is evaluated next. The creation of the element is canceled after a user controlled number of failed tests. Figure 10 depicts the priority map for a window. EXCERPT #ZP3TVY p. 7 EXCERPT #PRDECU p. 7 EXCERPT #TK3Z2B p. 7 Figure 9: Three 3D renderings of houses generated by the system using Open Shape Grammars. The first image shows a cluster of houses on a sloped terrain with a yellow road. The second image shows a single house with a white facade and a grey roof. The third image shows a larger building complex with multiple rooms and a grey roof. EXCERPT #6ZBUFC p. 7 Fig. 9 Example of houses created by our system using Open Shape Grammars EXCERPT #CMVU34 p. 7 Figure 10: Three 3D renderings of a house showing the adaptation of window location. The first image shows a red square indicating a collision. The second image shows a yellow and red heatmap indicating the priority map. The third image shows a green square indicating the final window position. EXCERPT #K8G5HH p. 7 Fig. 10 Adaptation of window location: collision, priority map, result, displacement cost kernel. EXCERPT #9AW4XB p. 7 \mathcal{K} = \begin{pmatrix} 2.0 & 0.1 & 2.0 \\ 0.5 & \infty & 0.5 \\ 2.0 & 0.1 & 2.0 \end{pmatrix} EXCERPT #BGRWGE p. 7 Shape adaptation The second level of adaptation is to change the geometry of the façade element that we try to create (Figure 11). The candidate shapes are stored in a predefined priority queue, depending on the building type. To position an object, we initialize its shape to the top of the priority queue. If all positioning attempts fail, the shape is changed and the process starts again. If no shape is appropriate, the object is not built. EXCERPT #NA95LS p. 7 Figure 11: Three 3D renderings of a house showing shape adaptation. The first image shows a red square indicating a collision. The second image shows a red square indicating a collision. The third image shows a green square indicating the final shape. EXCERPT #MJJZJ9 p. 7 Fig. 11 Shape adaptation using an open shape grammar. For each window type we test for position (here, with only horizontal moves and a minimum distance between windows), and change shape if construction is not possible. SECTION #7MTUXN 7 Results EXCERPT #W7MDNC p. 7 Our village modeling system is coded in C++. Renderings were performed by using Mental Ray on the textured meshes we output. EXCERPT #TERPPP p. 7 Parcels generation To validate our parcel generation method, we compared the shapes of the parcels we create with those of real village layouts, with similar building distributions and road networks. One of our results is depicted in Figure 12. Parcels have similar shapes and the mean number of neighbors (2.873 with our model, 2.812 in the real data) and of contour edges (4.29 with our model, 4.068 in the real data) are similar. EXCERPT #H6X9RB p. 7 Figure 12: Comparison of real versus generated land parcels on terrains with similar roads and building distributions. The left image shows a real village layout with black lines for roads and buildings. The right image shows a generated village layout with yellow circles for buildings and red lines for roads. EXCERPT #5ADPMR p. 7 Fig. 12 Comparison of real versus generated land parcels on terrains with similar roads and building distributions. EXCERPT #39BHEB p. 7 Geometry generation Our method of buildings generation with an Open Shape Grammar allows us to create homes on steep slopes without the doors and windows that are in collision with the ground. Note on the Figure 9 the change of position and shape of these elements. Appendix A details the rules we use to generate windows on building façades, and compare them to standard grammar rules. EXCERPT #7FTKUC p. 7 Village diversity Figures 14, 13, 15 and 1 show different kinds of villages generated by our method. Figure 14 shows mountain villages, for which geographical domination was the main factor influencing seeding. Figure 13 shows a fortified village on a top of cliff where the main criteria were geographical domination and being protected by fortifications. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for generating settlements that conform to European layout styles. We believe that non-European village types could be created as well by modifying and tuning the growth scenario and the cost functions. A complete comparison and validation is beyond the scope of this paper. EXCERPT #H9ZSDE p. 7 Influence of parameters Figure 15 shows the influence of parameters during seeding. Distance to the sea was the main criterion for the creation of the first village, whereas the second was seeking for domination. EXCERPT #58TDXE p. 7 Performance Table 1 gives the time spent in each phase of the generation process. Land parcel generation is the most compute intensive part of our algorithm, due to the size of the grid used to perform the spread (we used a 4096 \times 4096 grid). Note that depending on the desired output (with or without individual gardens around houses), this step can be skipped. EXCERPT #GD6HND p. 8 EXCERPT #9ZHY6E p. 8 EXCERPT #VEXQKH p. 8 Figure 13: A large aerial view of a fortified village on a cliff, with two smaller inset images showing different views of the same village. EXCERPT #6DMP3L p. 8 Fig. 13 Fortified village at the top of a cliff, using a war-time growth scenario followed by farming style settlement. EXCERPT #V8W2BP p. 8 Figure 14: A real highland hamlet (top left) and a procedurally generated highland hamlet (top right, bottom). EXCERPT #GPH627 p. 8 Fig. 14 A real (top left) and a procedurally generated highland hamlet (top right, bottom). EXCERPT #KMXDWA p. 8 Fisherman Mountain Fortified Skeleton 4:00 5:00 7:00 Parcels 7:00 11:00 13:00 Geometry 0:20 0:30 0:30 EXCERPT #VBE5EW p. 8 Table 1 Computation time (in minutes) for generating the villages shown in Figure 13, 14 and 15 EXCERPT #EYJ8SX p. 8 Limitations The main limitation of our method is the number of user-set parameters, currently 150 per village type. Fortunately, these parameters, stored in the building encyclopedia, can be reused to create a large variety of villages, depending on the terrain and on easily specified growth scenario typically created in 2 minutes. Displaying the interest values on the terrain helps users understand and parameterize the method, although their goals may still be obtained after a long series of trials and errors, as in every procedural generation method. SECTION #Z6JU3C 8 Conclusion EXCERPT #YPXSTF p. 8 This paper presented an original method for generating scattered settlements on arbitrary terrains, enabling villages and hamlets, with the associated roads, forests and fields to be built on arbitrary landscapes. We demonstrated that our method can generate different types of villages with a coherent and adapted geometry. We validated our results through comparison with real layouts and pictures. In the future, we would like to focus on a user-controlled generation framework allowing real-time editing of villages. Our target application is an interactive system to enabling quick authoring of landscapes rather than a fully automated system. As it is, our method provides a very good starting point to develop such a system. EXCERPT #HEGJBJ p. 8 Acknowledgements This work was funded by the ERC advanced grant EXPRESSIVE. SECTION #PMU6Z6 References EXCERPT #ZHAHVJ p. 8 Aliaga, D.G., Vanegas, C.A., Beneš, B.: Interactive example-based urban layout synthesis. SIGGRAPH Asia , pp. 160:1–160:10 (2008) Barry, T. (ed.): A story of settlement in Ireland. Routledge (1999) Bruneton, E., Neyret, F.: Real-time rendering and editing of vector-based terrains. Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics) (2008) Chen, G., Esch, G., Wonka, P., Müller, P., Zhang, E.: Interactive procedural street modeling. ACM Trans. Graph. 27 (3) (2008) Desbenoit, B., Galin, E., Akkouche, S.: Simulating and modeling lichen growth. Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics) 23 (3), 341–350 (2004) Galín, E., Peytavie, A., Guérin, E., Benes, B.: Authoring hierarchical road networks. Computer Graphics Forum (Pacific Graphics) 29 (7), 2021–2030 (2011) Galín, E., Peytavie, A., Guérin, E., Marechal, N.: Procedural Generation of Roads . Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics) 29 (2), 429–438 (2010) Glass, K.R., Morkel, C., Bangay, S.D.: Duplicating road patterns in south african informal settlements using procedural techniques. In: Proceedings AFRIGRAPH (2006) Kelly, G., McCabe, H.: Citygen: An interactive system for procedural city generation. In: Game Design & Technology Workshop (2006) Kelly, T., Wonka, P.: Interactive architectural modeling with procedural extrusions. ACM Trans. Graph. 30 , 14:1–14:15 (2011) Lipp, M., Scherzer, D., Wonka, P., Wimmer, M.: Interactive modeling of city layouts using layers of procedural content. Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics) 30 (2), 345–354 (2011) McCrae, J., Singh, K.: Sketch-based path design. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2009 , pp. 95–102 (2009) Müller, P., Wonka, P., Haegler, S., Ulmer, A., Van Gool, L.: Procedural modeling of buildings. In: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH , pp. 614–623 (2006) EXCERPT #BEFSM9 p. 9 EXCERPT #PHH4GH p. 9 EXCERPT #BFMURE p. 9 Figure 15: Three images showing settlement patterns on a coast. The left image is a 3D rendering of a fisherman village with colorful houses and a harbor. The middle and right images are 2D maps of the same area, showing red lines representing roads or paths that favor geographical domination. EXCERPT #PBXREB p. 9 Fig. 15 Settlement on a coast. The left and middle pictures show a fisherman village, favoring distance to the sea; on right picture is a defensive village, which prefer geographical domination. EXCERPT #C5CPS9 p. 9 14. Mch, R., Prusinkiewicz, P.: Visual models of plants interacting with their environment. SIGGRAPH, pp. 397–410 (1996) 15. Parish, Y.I.H., Mller, P.: Procedural modeling of cities. In: E. Fiume (ed.) Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, pp. 301–308 (2001) 16. Vanegas, C.A., Aliaga, D.G., Bene, B., Waddell, P.A.: Interactive design of urban spaces using geometrical and behavioral modeling. ACM Trans. Graph. 28 , 111:1–111:10 (2009) 17. Vanegas, C.A., Aliaga, D.G., Wonka, P., Mller, P., Waddell, P., Watson, B.: Modeling the appearance and behavior of urban spaces. Computer Graphics forum 29 (1), 25–42 (2010) 18. Weber, B., Mller, P., Wonka, P., Gross, M.H.: Interactive geometric simulation of 4d cities. Comput. Graph. Forum 28 (2), 481–492 (2009) 19. Wonka, P., Wimmer, M., Sillion, F., Ribarsky, W.: Instant architecture. ACM Trans. Graph. 22 , 669–677 (2003) SECTION #S7RURD Appendix A: Example of Open Shape Grammar rules EXCERPT #VUWSRV p. 9 WindowFacade → while (∃ shape in shapes priority queue) while (∃ pos in positions priority queue) if (try (Window(pos, shape))) { Walls } = { extract Window from WindowFacade } throw success throw failure EXCERPT #ZFJWEG p. 9 Window (pos, shape) → if (external constraints (pos, shape)) { Woodent parts | Shutters | ... } throw success else throw failure EXCERPT #9ZSGZ4 p. 9 Portrait of Arnaud Emilien, a doctoral student at LJK, University of Grenoble, France, and at LIGUM, University of Montreal, Canada. EXCERPT #RABTGS p. 9 Arnaud Emilien is a doctoral student at LJK, University of Grenoble, France, and at LIGUM, University of Montreal, Canada. He completed his Master degree in Computer Science at Grenoble Institute of Technology - Ensimag in 2011. His research interests range from real-time rendering to the procedural modeling of virtual worlds. EXCERPT #K5PBF6 p. 9 Portrait of Adrien Bernhardt, a doctoral student at LJK, University of Grenoble, France. EXCERPT #98RZ8A p. 9 Adrien Bernhardt is a doctoral student at LJK, University of Grenoble, France. He received a Master degree in Computer Science at Grenoble Institute of Technology - Ensimag in 2006. His research interests include implicit modeling, sketch-based interfaces, and terrain modeling software. EXCERPT #LQ5VYF p. 9 Portrait of Adrien Peytavie, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Universit Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France. EXCERPT #HE6JTS p. 9 Adrien Peytavie is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Universit Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Universit Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in Computer Science in 2010. His research interests include procedural modeling of virtual worlds and simulating natural phenomena. EXCERPT #HAJ7SV p. 9 Portrait of Eric Galin, a Professor of Computer Science at the Universit Lumre Lyon 2, France. EXCERPT #436CKV p. 9 Eric Galin is Professor of Computer Science at the Universit Lumre Lyon 2, France. He received an engineering degree from Ecole Centrale de Lyon in 1993 and a PhD in Computer Science from Universit Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in 1997. His research interests include procedural modelling of virtual worlds, simulating natural phenomena and modelling with implicit surfaces. EXCERPT #LDGKVA p. 9 Portrait of Marie-Paule Cani, a Professor of Computer Science at Grenoble Institute of Technology. EXCERPT #X4XL95 p. 9 Marie-Paule Cani is Professor of Computer Science at Grenoble Institute of Technology. A graduate from the Ecole Normale Suprieure, she received a PhD from the University Paris 11 in 1990. Her research focus is making the creation of animated virtual worlds more intuitive, thanks to sketch-based interfaces, procedural models and interactive animation methods. ### 16. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `web_search` ```json { "query": "\"Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains\" DOI authors 2012 venue" } ``` ### 17. Tool result: web_search WEB SEARCH RESULTS Query: "Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains" DOI authors 2012 venue **Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains** - **Authors:** Arnaud Emilien, Adrien Bernhardt, Adrien Peytavie, Marie-Paule Cani, and Eric Galin - **Year:** 2012 - **Venue:** *The Visual Computer*, volume 28, issues 6–8, pages 809–818; associated with **Computer Graphics International (CGI) 2012** - **DOI:** `10.1007/s00371-012-0699-7` ([researchportal.ip-paris.fr](https://researchportal.ip-paris.fr/fr/publications/procedural-generation-of-villages-on-arbitrary-terrains/?utm_source=openai)) **Citation:** > Emilien, A., Bernhardt, A., Peytavie, A., Cani, M.-P., & Galin, E. (2012). Procedural generation of villages on arbitrary terrains. *The Visual Computer, 28*(6–8), 809–818. DOI: 10.1007/s00371-012-0699-7. Cited sources: - Procedural generation of villages on arbitrary terrains - Institut Polytechnique de Paris: https://researchportal.ip-paris.fr/fr/publications/procedural-generation-of-villages-on-arbitrary-terrains/?utm_source=openai ### 18. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `update_document_metadata` ```json { "authors": [ "Arnaud Emilien", "Adrien Bernhardt", "Adrien Peytavie", "Marie-Paule Cani", "Eric Galin" ], "document_id": "EARFEK", "doi": "10.1007/s00371-012-0699-7", "kind": "journal_article", "title": "Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains", "venue": "The Visual Computer", "year": "2012" } ``` ### 19. Tool result: update_document_metadata Updated metadata for #EARFEK: kind, title, authors, year, venue, doi ### 20. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `document_import` ```json { "action": "validate", "run_id": "MQ3XLF" } ``` ### 21. 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Assistant Imported and validated all three PDFs: - **Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains** (2012) — #EARFEK - **Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment** (2013) — #K82AS7 - **From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology** (2019) — #2284QZ Metadata and search indexes are complete; all documents passed validation. ### 23. User great! can you read them so you can give them nice microabstracts and generate cover art for each one? ### 24. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "K82AS7" } ``` #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "2284QZ" } ``` ### 25. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #K82AS7 Title: Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment Outline: - 1 #8A96NY Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment - 1.1 #MLUVZQ ARTICLE INFO - 1.1.1 #Y25DJW Article history: - 1.1.2 #7NBQYJ Keywords: - 1.2 #NL38SC ABSTRACT - 1.3 #RSL6SW 1. Introduction - 1.4 #3JQMUD 2. Use and definitions of 'legacy sediment' - 1.4.1 #Z6B52B 2.1. Increasing use - 1.4.2 #AUTYGJ 2.2. Initial definitions of LS - 1.4.3 #K795QH 2.3. A broader definition - 1.4.4 #7PHD4S 2.4. Beyond North America - 1.4.5 #YSRCQQ 2.5. LS as a stratigraphic unit - 1.5 #RXH3TA 3. Implications of episodicity - 1.6 #RZTUYS 4. Types and geomorphic positions of LS deposits - 1.7 #L3T5NJ 5. Processes governing LS deposition and preservation - 1.7.1 #7QBVBC 5.1. Sediment production, delivery, and transport capacity - 1.7.2 #VJJ5SJ 5.2. Storage potential and retention time - 1.8 #Z4WK9K 6. Conclusions - 1.9 #93WENN Acknowledgements - 1.10 #BCQW8H References ### 26. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #2284QZ Title: From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology Outline: - 1 #VLKAY7 From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology - 1.1 #5TDTBF Abstract - 1.2 #KPCLNR Keywords - 1.3 #DLKXAK Corresponding author: - 1.4 #BFCM9J I Introduction - 1.4.1 #78JRJG 1.1 Anthropogenic landscapes are sociocultural palimpsests - 1.4.2 #C44HCX 1.2 Anthropogenic features and sociocultural fingerprints - 1.4.3 #FWBSME 1.3 Understanding the socioeconomic and sociocultural drivers of anthropogenic landscape evolution - 1.5 #9KVR6Y II The diversity of anthropogenic geomorphic features - 1.5.1 #WZ8DVJ 2.1 Symbolic - 1.5.2 #5PERUL 2.2 Habitation - 1.5.3 #SEJ8EJ 2.3 Transport/exchange networks - 1.5.4 #2K6Y46 2.4 Subsistence - 1.5.5 #8D8ZLK 2.5 Mining - 1.5.6 #84BWZK 2.6 Water infrastructure - 1.5.7 #TCU4AN 2.7 Refuse disposal - 1.5.8 #TBMMJV 2.8 Warfare - 1.6 #YCKRKZ III The contribution of remote sensing - 1.6.1 #YGPE5Y 3.1 Extraction from imagery - 1.6.2 #FBTE4L 3.2 Extraction from three-dimensional surfaces - 1.6.3 #FCT7E8 3.3 Quantitative assessment of features - 1.6.4 #NJ5MGF 3.4 Limits and merits - 1.7 #PQTLPN IV Decoding palimpsests: From features to fingerprints - 1.7.1 #5TYSD5 4.1 General principles of sociocultural landscape formation - 1.7.2 #J98VPL 4.2 From features to fingerprints - 1.7.3 #TZSW59 4.3 A way forward - 1.8 #KVCHWE V Concluding remarks - 1.9 #EKP6XU Declaration of conflicting interests - 1.10 #9S2CCJ Funding - 1.11 #N4SS2N ORCID iD - 1.12 #U3GFSC References ### 27. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "NL38SC", "K795QH", "RXH3TA", "Z4WK9K" ], "expand": true } ``` #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "5TDTBF", "78JRJG", "C44HCX", "J98VPL", "TZSW59", "KVCHWE" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 28. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #K82AS7 Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment SECTION #NL38SC ABSTRACT EXCERPT #92Z7C8 p. 0 Extensive anthropogenic terrestrial sedimentary deposits are well recognized in the geologic literature and are increasingly being referred to as legacy sediment (LS). Definitions of LS are reviewed and a broad but explicit definition is recommended based on episodically produced anthropogenic sediment. The phrase is being used in a variety of ways, but primarily in North America to describe post-settlement alluvium overlying older surfaces. The role of humans may be implied by current usage, but this is not always clear. The definition of LS should include alluvium and colluvium resulting to a substantial degree from a range of human-induced disturbances; e.g., vegetation clearance, logging, agriculture, mining, grazing, or urbanization. Moreover, LS should apply to sediment resulting from anthropogenic episodes on other continents and to sediment deposited by earlier episodes of human activities. EXCERPT #XXU68Z p. 0 Given a broad definition of LS, various types of LS deposits are described followed by a qualitative description of processes governing deposition, preservation, and recruitment. LS is deposited and preserved where sediment delivery ( D_s ) exceeds sediment transport capacity ( T_c ). This can be expressed as a storage potential ratio that varies within and between basins and through time. When D_s/T_c < 1 , recruitment and transport of LS dominate, but if D_s/T_c > 1 , deposition and preservation are likely. When D_s/T_c \gg 1 , abundant deposition and graded deposits are likely even without barriers or sinks. Thus, spatial patterns of LS deposits may reveal information about past land-use history and hydrodynamics in a catchment. EXCERPT #LK7ZC6 p. 0 © 2013 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. DOCUMENT #K82AS7 Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment SECTION #K795QH 2.3. A broader definition EXCERPT #D5YT7W p. 2 A more general definition of LS is needed for the various applications of the term that are emerging in the scientific literature. The definition should be flexible enough to include sediment produced by a range and mixture of anthropogenic activities that may have resulted in a wide variety of depositional sites, processes, and sedimentary structures and textures. First, the definition of LS should include human activities beyond agricultural clearance; i.e., lumbering, mining, road building, urbanization, and other land-use practices (Fig. 2). By including sediment from resource extraction activities such as mining and logging, this definition of LS may differ somewhat from some literal interpretations of post-settlement alluvium (PSA). Deposition from mining, lumbering, and other such activities may occur in extra-frontier outposts prior to or without settlement of a region, so LS may apply to anthropogenic deposits in addition to PSA. Given the difficulties of (1) determining the source of sedimentary materials, (2) the polygenetic histories of many deposits, and (3) complexities of isolating effects of climate change, thorough and precise identification of how sediment was produced should not be a sticking point as long as it is clear that the deposit is associated with processes substantially accelerated by human activities. The term has a logical potential to describe broad classes of anthropogenic sediment in a variety of environments and it is increasingly being used that way in the literature. EXCERPT #JSX34W p. 3 EXCERPT #VPKNVQ p. 3 EXCERPT #92WNRW p. 3 Aerial photograph of Shady Creek, California, showing a braided channel with multiple bars and terraces. The surrounding area is densely forested, and the water appears to be flowing through a series of sand and gravel bars. EXCERPT #PG6SY9 p. 3 Fig. 2. Braid-bar terraces of Shady Creek, California. This is a small creek that received large volumes of hydraulic gold mining sediment in the 19th century, aggraded, then incised. The white terrace sands and gravels are a legacy of mining. Photographed November, 2002 by author. EXCERPT #H97PXG p. 3 With regard to geomorphic forms and position on the landscape, LS deposits may progress through facies changes from rills and gullies, to cobble- and gravel-bed streams in steep valleys, to floodplains and channel fill along large rivers, to fine-grained deposits in slack-water environments. Definitions that attempt to separate one part of a facies can falter if changes are time transgressive or if channel morphogenesis has occurred. Different fluvial environments may dominate a site at different times during a depositional episode resulting in strata that represent multiple environments. For example, a meandering channel floodplain may be converted to a braided channel and revert back to a meandering channel all within a single period of settlement. A debris flow from a side valley may deposit coarse colluvium on top of laminated overbank silts leaving cobbles overlying fine-grained material in an historical section. Defining LS on the basis of a particular phase or environment of deposition can be problematic. Some definitions of LS have emphasized the impacts on modern fluvial systems (PDEP, nd ; Niemitz et al. , 2013). Although LS is often highly disruptive to environmental systems (Wohl and Rathburn, 2013) and this is very important in environmental management, substantial alterations to hydrologic, biologic, aquatic, riparian, and chemical functions should not be a defining condition for sediment to be classified as LS. EXCERPT #TKDT8T p. 3 These factors, together with common usage of the term, provide the basis for a definition of LS as sedimentary deposits generated episodically by human activities: EXCERPT #V3AGEQ p. 3 “Legacy sediment: Earth materials—primarily alluvium [or colluvium]—deposited following human disturbances such as deforestation, agricultural land use, or mining. The phrase is often used to describe post-European floodplain sediment, also known as post settlement alluvium. Awareness of legacy sediment has grown in response to the importance it plays in sediment budgets, water quality, river restoration, toxicity, lateral channel connectivity, and geomorphic theory...” (James, 2013, Glossary) EXCERPT #H3SFG4 p. 3 “Legacy sediment is primarily alluvium [and colluvium] that was deposited following human disturbances in a watershed. The disturbance may have been in the form of deforestation, plowing agricultural land, mining, or other land-use changes. In EXCERPT #8VUR8S p. 3 North America and Australia, legacy sediments are ubiquitous and represent episodic erosion in response to the colonization of land by European settlers who introduced Old World land-clearance technologies (e.g. steel tools and plows pulled by draft animals) and export economies. In these settings, legacy sediments are often described as post-settlement alluvium (PSA), which may cover entire floodplains and bury the pre-settlement soil with a thick mantle of relatively young stratified sediment (Griffiths, 1979; Knox, 1972, 1977, 2006). (James, 2010, p. 588) EXCERPT #B3HC4Y p. 3 These definitions refer to the entire depositional body, not simply the anthropogenic portions of sediment within the deposit. LS deposits are deposited over a period of centuries but they are time transgressive because initiation as well as peak rates may occur at different times within a basin and at largely different times between regions. Production of LS may be polycyclic with multiple events over time, such as when failed mill dams or collapsed gully walls produce a second cycle of anthropogenic sediment. Thus, LS cascades may occur in space as reworking of LS moves sediment down hillslopes, into channels, and onto floodplains (Lang et al. , 2003; Fuchs et al. , 2011). LS may have a distinct lithology and geochemistry or it may be highly variable down-valley or between subwatersheds and indistinguishable from underlying sediment. Non-anthropogenic sediment will usually be mixed with anthropic sediment, so LS is usually diluted and rarely purely of anthropic origin. In regions with deep LS deposits the anthropogenic proportion is likely to be high. Several studies have shown greatly accelerated sediment deposition rates after disturbance and relatively slow background sedimentation rates (Gilbert, 1917; Knox, 2006). Although there are important exceptions to the assumptions of low pre-settlement and high post-settlement sedimentation rates in North America (James, 2011), pre-Columbia sediment accumulation rates were generally an order of magnitude lower than post-settlement rates. Thus, PSA is likely to contain a high proportion of anthropogenic sediment, and the assumption of substantial proportions of anthropic sediment in such a deposit is often appropriate. DOCUMENT #K82AS7 Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment SECTION #RXH3TA 3. Implications of episodicity EXCERPT #6MAQBD p. 4 Given the ubiquity of anthropogenically accelerated sediment production during the late historic period, it could be argued that all historic sediment has a component of anthropogenic inputs and should be defined as LS. Instead, LS should be reserved for deposits that represent substantially accelerated rates of sedimentation due to a component of anthropogenic disturbance. Thus, LS should not be used synonymously with 'historical' sediment sensu stricto , because LS carries the connotation of episodically produced anthropogenic sedimentation. This does not preclude sedimentation events generated, in part, by climatic change or tectonics as long as substantial production was generated by human activity. EXCERPT #3YVSD7 p. 4 During periods of intensive land use; e.g., clearance and plowing for agriculture, grazing, timbering, mining, etc., an episode of high sediment production may result in channel aggradation downstream. In extreme cases, aggradation may extend onto floodplains where large volumes of anthropogenic sediment may be stored (Fig. 3). When the intensive land-use practices cease and sediment production returns to background levels, channels usually incise, leaving large deposits on the former floodplain as terrace deposits. Following relatively rapid channel down-cutting, lateral erosion of channels takes a much longer time to widen floodplains and erode the stored LS (Simon and Hupp, 1986). Thus, the initial return of channels to their pre-disturbance base levels and gradients occurs long before the erosion and reworking of LS is complete. Such a sequence can be described as an aggradation-degradation episode (ADE) (James and Lecce, 2013) and represents the passage of a bed wave and a sediment wave (James, 2010). Protracted sediment production from this long term reworking represents a form of temporal connectivity in which the system memory of past sedimentation events is propagated into the future. If the floodplain had been relatively stable prior to the event, a distinct soil may have formed on it. In many cases, the LS deposits left behind by the ADE may be distinguished from the earlier alluvium by an abrupt contact of recent alluvium overlying a buried soil that can be seen in bank exposures and cores (Fig. 4). EXCERPT #6THDQZ p. 4 Figure 3: Four phases of an aggradation-degradation episode (ADE). The figure consists of four cross-sectional diagrams labeled 1 through 4. Diagram 1 shows a single channel with a small blue area representing water. Diagram 2 shows the channel widening and aggrading, with sediment (yellow) building up on the floodplain. Diagram 3 shows the channel narrowing and incising, with sediment (yellow) returning to background levels. Diagram 4 shows the channel widening and aggrading again, with sediment (yellow) building up on the floodplain. EXCERPT #M8JXYK p. 4 Fig. 3. Four phases of an aggradation-degradation episode (ADE): (1) single thread channel prior to disturbance; (2) channel and floodplain aggrade; possibly forming a braided channel, in response to sediment loads in excess of transport capacity; (3) as sediment loads return to background levels, channels rejoin and incise down to original levels; (4) channels widen over a longer period of time. See James and Lecce (2013) for description of ADEs. EXCERPT #5KWFJP p. 4 The post-settlement period in North America provides many widespread examples of ADEs. Accelerated sediment production began with land clearance, hillslope erosion, and sediment deliveries in small catchments early in the sequence. Later, post-settlement alluvium arrived down-valley, channels aggraded, and floodplains were buried by overbank deposition. As land-use pressures decreased in the mid-twentieth century—possibly in response to cessation of farming or mining or to initiation of soil conservation measures, and possibly aided by dam construction upstream—sediment deliveries decreased, channels incised, and former aggraded floodplains were abandoned as terraces. In many places channel beds have returned to pre-settlement base levels and are slowly widening their floodplains. LS may continue to be reworked by this process and delivered to lower positions in large basins for many centuries. Recognition of these protracted responses to LS is essential to an understanding of watershed sediment dynamics. DOCUMENT #K82AS7 Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment SECTION #Z4WK9K 6. Conclusions EXCERPT #WF93WF p. 7 Numerous studies of anthropogeomorphic impacts since the Neolithic have documented sedimentation events in a variety of geomorphic environments. Legacy sediment (LS) is now commonly used in geomorphic, ecological, water quality, and toxicological studies to describe post-settlement alluvium on river floodplains. Most applications of LS imply or explicitly attribute the sediment to human landscape changes, but explicit definitions have been lacking that are sufficiently broad to apply LS to the variety of applications now common. The concept of LS should apply to anthropogenic sediment that was produced episodically over a period of decades or centuries, regardless of position on the landscape, geomorphic process of deposition, or sedimentary characteristics; i.e., it may occur as hillslope colluvium, floodplain alluvium, or lacustrine and estuarine slackwater deposits. LS can be defined with expanded geographic and temporal limits to include episodic human land-use activities wherever and during whatever period of pre-history or history in which they occurred. EXCERPT #743ZPV p. 8 EXCERPT #52Q4XU p. 8 EXCERPT #94BZ29 p. 8 Anthropogenic sedimentation has recurred globally throughout the Anthropocene in response to a variety of agricultural or resource extraction activities that accelerated sediment production. Mining, intensive agriculture, and logging generated recurrent episodes of LS production, associated with Roman outposts in Europe, and western colonization of North and South America, Australia, and other areas of Oceania. Recognition of these widespread and highly diverse legacies of human activities is important for a proper interpretation of watershed dynamics at a broad range of scales. EXCERPT #CZKRYZ p. 8 Legacy sediment is deposited when intensified land-use results in sediment deliveries greater than sediment transport capacity. This may lead to valley-bottom aggradation, which is ultimately followed by channel incision when the sediment wave passes and sediment loads decrease. This aggradation–degradation episode (ADE) tends to leave large volumes of LS in storage because vertical channel incision occurs much more quickly than channel widening. Many river systems in North America are still in the widening phase of adjustment to an ADE. Channel beds have returned to pre-settlement elevations but LS remains stored in extensive terrace deposits. The lagged responses and prolonged sediment recruitment represent a temporal connectivity. Recognition of these processes and the inherent imbalance in fluvial systems caused by tremendous volumes of LS storage is essential to wise policy development in river science, stream restoration, aquatic ecology, and flood risk management. ### 29. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology SECTION #5TDTBF Abstract EXCERPT #96TBJP p. 0 Human societies have been reshaping the geomorphology of landscapes for thousands of years, producing anthropogenic geomorphic features ranging from earthworks and reservoirs to settlements, roads, canals, ditches and plough furrows that have distinct characteristics compared with landforms produced by natural processes. Physical geographers have long recognized the widespread importance of these features in altering landforms and geomorphic processes, including hydrologic flows and stores, to processes of soil erosion and deposition. In many of the same landscapes, archaeologists have also utilized anthropogenic geomorphic features to detect and analyse human societal activities, including symbolic formations, agricultural systems, settlement patterns and trade networks. This paper provides a general framework aimed at integrating geophysical and archaeological approaches to observing, identifying and interpreting the full range of anthropogenic geomorphic features based on their structure and functioning, both individually and as components of landscape-scale management strategies by different societies, or “sociocultural fingerprints”. We then couple this framework with new algorithms developed to detect anthropogenic geomorphic features using precisely detailed three-dimensional reconstructions of landscape surface structure derived from LiDAR and computer vision photogrammetry. Human societies are now transforming the geomorphology of landscapes at increasing rates and scales across the globe. To understand the causes and consequences of these transformations and contribute to building sustainable futures, the science of physical geography must advance towards empirical and theoretical frameworks that integrate the natural and sociocultural forces that are now the main shapers of Earth’s surface processes. DOCUMENT #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology SECTION #78JRJG 1.1 Anthropogenic landscapes are sociocultural palimpsests EXCERPT #UGW432 p. 1 While many species alter their environments, humans are Earth's ultimate ecosystem engineers, engaging in a broader range of more potent environment-modifying behaviours than any other species (Smith, 2007; Smith and Zeder, 2013). By engineering environments using fire, tools of increasingly complex design and domesticated species, and by harnessing non-human energy to accomplish these modifications, human niche construction practices have radically enhanced the adaptive fitness of human individuals, social groups and societies, enabling human societies to increase in scale and to extend their reach across Earth's terrestrial surface (Ellis, 2015; Ellis et al., 2018). Most importantly, human capacities to engineer environments are not biological, but sociocultural, and these sociocultural capacities have evolved and accumulated over time together with human capacities for cooperation and social learning (Ellis, 2015; Ellis et al., 2018) (Figure 1). Human sociocultural niche construction has diversified, scaled up and utilized increasing amounts of energy over millennia, from the first use of fire to clear land (for greater success in hunting and foraging), to the construction and management of agricultural landscapes using animal labour, to urban settlements powered by fossil fuels, to the global networks of exchange infrastructure that have made contemporary human societies the most interdependent in history and have made humanity a global force of nature (Figure 1). EXCERPT #QLW8UN p. 2 EXCERPT #SGHY5G p. 2 EXCERPT #MK7AVT p. 2 The diagram illustrates the evolution of human societies through various stages, categorized into five main horizontal tracks. The stages are defined by time periods at the top: Hunter Gatherer (Palaeolithic Lower, Upper, Mesolithic), Simple Horticultural (Early Neolithic), Advanced Horticultural (Later Neolithic & Chalcolithic), Simple Agrarian (Bronze Age), Advanced Agrarian (Iron Age), Industrial (Industrial Age), and Post-Industrial (Emerging Futures). Sociocultural Systems: A purple arrow showing the progression from Hunter Gatherer (Cooking, Land clearing, Segmentary Tribes) through Simple Horticultural (Villages, Domestication, Agriculture, Ceramics) and Advanced Horticultural (Chiefdoms, Textiles, Copper, Plow) to Simple Agrarian (States, Urbanization, Bronze, Sailing ships), Advanced Agrarian (Empires, Continental trade, Iron smelting), Industrial (Capitalism, Global trade, Fossil fuels), and Post-Industrial (Internet, Automation, Sustainability?). Cultural Inheritances: A red arrow showing the progression from Hunter Gatherer (Fire, Symbols, Languages, Trade, Burial rituals) through Simple Horticultural (Cultivation, Herding, Ritual specialization, Geoglyphs) and Advanced Horticultural (Weaving, Smelting, Craft specialization, Monumental burial) to Simple Agrarian (Numeracy, Literacy, Political specialization, Reservoirs), Advanced Agrarian (Taxation, Military, International trade, Printing, Money), Industrial (Mechanization, Synthetics, Scientific specialization), and Post-Industrial (Telecommunication, Computation, Robotics). Social Scales: A yellow arrow showing the progression from Hunter Gatherer (Kinship, Small Bands, Social Status: Achieved) through Simple Horticultural (Segmentary tribes, Raiding, Trading, Debt Slavery) and Advanced Horticultural (Villages) to Simple Agrarian (Chiefdoms, Kingdoms, States) and Advanced Agrarian (Empires). The Industrial and Post-Industrial stages are labeled 'Socioeconomic' and include Federated states and Beyond states?. Energy use: A green arrow showing the progression from Hunter Gatherer (Cooking) through Simple Horticultural (Burning) and Advanced Horticultural (Smelting) to Simple Agrarian (Animal Traction) and Advanced Agrarian (Biomass). The Industrial stage is labeled 'Fossil' and the Post-Industrial stage is labeled 'Abiotic'. Anthropogenic Geomorphic Features: A grey arrow showing the progression from Hunter Gatherer (Hearths) through Simple Horticultural (Ditches, Graves, Middens, Postholes, Buildings, Megaliths) and Advanced Horticultural (Terraces, Monuments, Mines, Boundary walls) to Simple Agrarian (Embankments, Cities, Ports, Canals, Improved roads, Concrete structures) and Advanced Agrarian (Sewers, Factories, Railroads). The Industrial and Post-Industrial stages include Powerlines, Telecom infrastructure, Brownfields, Constructed wetlands, Highways, and Airports. A scale at the bottom right indicates energy use in \text{GJ person}^{-1} . Figure 1: Conceptual diagram of long-term changes in sociocultural systems, cultural inheritances, societal scale, energy use, and anthropogenic geomorphic features across different stages of human history. EXCERPT #7PBD4X p. 2 Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of long-term changes in sociocultural systems, cultural inheritances, societal scale, energy use and anthropogenic geomorphic features. Different societies combine different sets of anthropogenic geomorphic features, including both pre-existing and novel, to produce their sociocultural fingerprints across landscapes (this figure expands on Ellis, 2015, Figure 3 and Ellis et al., 2018, Figure 1). EXCERPT #ZJV584 p. 2 Human modification of landscapes has tended to increase in scale and complexity together with the scale and complexity of human societies (Ellis, 2015). By the Late Pleistocene, opportunistic use of naturally occurring fire was supplemented by technologies of fire-maintenance and fire-making (Sandgate and Berna, 2017), amplifying the ability of humans to transform ecosystems and the erosive and EXCERPT #HJJLLM p. 2 hydrologic processes accompanying land clearing over extensive areas, either intentionally or unintentionally. The construction of settlements by sedentary hunter-gatherers and early farmers left more robust geomorphic evidence due to the systematic and deliberate reconfiguration of landscapes, often reflecting distinctive patterns in social behaviour and material culture (Fletcher, 2009). As societies scaled up over time, into the first agricultural, urbanized and then industrial societies, their ecosystem engineering also increased in scale, complexity, durability and in the sheer amounts of material moved (Figure 1). EXCERPT #65TAFJ p. 3 EXCERPT #EWQDYP p. 3 EXCERPT #EBG5LP p. 3 Even more significant complexity in anthropogenic landforms has emerged over time, as the geomorphic features engineered in support of one society have come to be inherited by, overlaid by, overwritten and reconstructed by later societies, such that the anthropogenic features and landforms of regions with sustained human occupation represent not the directed efforts of a single society, but rather the complex sociocultural palimpsests of multiple diverse societies (Bailey, 2007). Moreover, given that natural geomorphic processes continue to act during and after societal processes, the landform palimpsests of anthropogenic landscapes represent the sustained interplay of sociocultural and biogeophysical processes over time (Johnson and Ouimet, 2018). DOCUMENT #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology SECTION #C44HCX 1.2 Anthropogenic features and sociocultural fingerprints EXCERPT #LQCHXR p. 3 Individual anthropogenic features, as specific human modifications of land surfaces such as an individual graves, buildings or roads, show a wide variety of forms. In aggregate, however, the anthropogenic features produced by a given society may evince a degree of consistency within a given sociocultural milieu, as illustrated in Figure 1. Thus, as archaeologists have long recognized, the material cultures of different societies pattern the surface of Earth in specific ways that produce distinctive and recognizable sociocultural fingerprints (Butzer, 1974; 1982; David and Thomas, 2016). EXCERPT #RA7YNC p. 3 Anthropogenic landforms have tended to increase in scale and complexity in parallel with the scale and complexity of the societies that produce them. Composed of individual land surface modifications, or “anthropogenic features”, these are the products of socially and culturally directed efforts by individuals and social groups, increasingly assisted by animal labour, fossil-fuelled machinery and other non-human energy, to remove, transfer, introduce and reshape elements of the physical environment to achieve the EXCERPT #Y9MWA9 p. 3 goals of these individuals, social groups and entire societies. This social production of space generates a virtually endless variety of physical forms. We must therefore acknowledge at the outset the difficulties in dividing such myriad diversity of physical forms into neat categories according to their perceived function or meaning. Elements of material culture can, of course, be multifunctional, and polysemic, in ways that are arbitrary, unknowable and subject to variability over time. We argue, however, that there is practical and heuristic value in structuring the complexity of these physical forms into a generalized ontology of anthropogenic features, as in Figure 2: symbolic (e.g. graves and monuments), habitation (e.g. housing, villages, cities), transport and exchange (e.g. roads, canals), subsistence (e.g. plough furrows, irrigation networks), mining, refuse disposal and warfare (forts and battlements), among others. EXCERPT #2YJDU2 p. 3 Individual anthropogenic features are readily detectable on Earth’s surface (or below) through observations made on their geometric forms, and possibly through a range of other physical or chemical attributes. Smaller scale societies, such as those of the first farmers, tend to produce a relatively narrow range of anthropogenic features. However, even small-scale societies produce a diversity of distinctive anthropogenic features on the landscape within the framework of their material culture. For example, a horticultural society produces building and settlement structures, hand-tilled fields, waste middens and graves, while the material culture of more complex societies is characterized by large-scale urbanism, ploughed fields, irrigation systems, mines and quarries, roads, monuments, cemeteries and many other anthropogenic features. These individual features are the fundamental elements of material culture at the landscape scale and, considered in aggregate, it is possible to identify the distinctive spatial patterning of a society elaborated across time and space on the surface of Earth: the sociocultural fingerprints of societies and cultures. The EXCERPT #TXQPU3 p. 4 EXCERPT #SVTG8E p. 4 EXCERPT #Q6E45Z p. 4 Features Description Function Hearth-pits Bowl-shaped, ash deposits, soil discoloration; shallow (depth generally less than 0.5 m) and small (diameter less than 1 m) Subsistence: cooking, heat, firing of ceramics; limited metallurgy Burial sites Excavations, mounds, cemeteries including human remains Symbolic: repository for human remains 0 50 m Geoglyphs Human rearrangement of earth, stone and other materials to create symbolic anthropogenic landforms Symbolic: Public and ceremonial spaces, burial sites, funerary customs, animal trapping 0 12 m Rock-Shelter Natural rock formations associated with ancient human habitation, including campfires, remains, debris Habitation, shelter Megaliths Human-rearranged stones without mortar or concrete Symbolic: Monumental architecture, ceremonial spaces 0 80 m Buildings Permanent structures with roof and walls Habitation, storage, symbolic structures, other functions requiring permanent sites with protection from weather 0 80 m Cities Permanent large-scale human settlement, including infrastructure Habitation, trade; centers of human social interaction 0 40 m Boundary walls Linear raised features composed of earth, rock, wood, brick and other materials Protection of settlements, fortresses, and farms from potential aggression 0 50 m Roads Cleared, levelled, sometimes paved, interconnected linear features Transport: mobility for humans, livestock, vehicles, and exchange of materials among settlements 0 100 m Middens Mounds of domestic refuse containing shells, animal bones and other debris and remains marking sites of prehistoric settlement Refuse disposal 0 80 m Livestock trails Animal-induced paths trampled into earth, often interconnecting water and shelter Subsistence: livestock production 0 50 m Terraces Artificially-levelled shelves of land interrupting slopes Subsistence: facilitating crop production on steep slopes 0 100 m Mines Excavations maintained for mineral extraction Source of mineral resources, ore for metallurgy, clay for bricks, etc. 0 1000 m Ditches Narrow channels excavated around crop fields, buildings and road perimeters Drainage of settlements, roads, agricultural land, and water transport for irrigation 0 50 m EXCERPT #ZBSCSZ p. 4 Figure 2. Examples of anthropogenic geomorphic features, their sociocultural functions, and derived fingerprint on topography. From top to bottom: hearth-pit (Shahack-Gross et al. , 2014); West Kennet Long Barrow in Avebury, Wiltshire (UK), one of the largest and most impressive Neolithic graves in Britain (3650 BC) (ph: © Skyscan Balloon Photography; LiDAR: Survey Open Data UK); The Long Man of Wilmington on South Downs in Sussex, EXCERPT #C8ZABW p. 5 EXCERPT #9NNTPX p. 5 EXCERPT #CQJZ9P p. 5 Canals Large-scale, artificial linear excavations Transport of materials and people by boat, and water transport for irrigation Embankments Artificial mounds and structures of earth, stone and other materials along waterways Supporting infrastructure for flood protection from, and access to waterways Reservoirs Artificial lakes Water infrastructure, water storage, hydraulic power, aquaculture Constructed wetlands Flooded excavations Drainage, water treatment Trenches Long, narrow excavations Warfare: protection of military personnel Aerial view of a canal system in a rural landscape. Topographic map showing a canal network with a 250 m scale bar. Aerial view of a river with high earthen embankments. Topographic map showing a river with embankments with a 80 m scale bar. Aerial view of a large artificial reservoir. Topographic map showing a reservoir with a 480 m scale bar. Aerial view of a constructed wetland area. Topographic map showing a wetland area with a 240 m scale bar. Aerial view of a trench in a rocky landscape. Topographic map showing a trench with a 40 m scale bar. EXCERPT #LBGYN9 p. 5 Figure 2. (Continued). UK (ph. Steve Slater, LiDAR: Survey Open Data UK); rock shelter (ph. Bernard Gagnon); Stonehenge (UK) (LiDAR: Survey Open Data UK); building in Lugo (Spain) (ph. Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez; LiDAR: © Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica); El Tolmo (Spain), archaeological site showing a continuous time record of ancient civilizations from 3500 yr BP onwards (ph. Laclac; LiDAR: © Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica); Roman wall of Lugo (Spain) (ph. Xosema; LiDAR: © Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica); mountain road (ph. Chell Hill, LiDAR: OpenTopography Facility); shell middens at Mound Key (Florida) ( http://www.flpublicarchaeology.org/blog/crc/tag/soil-core/ ; LiDAR: NOAA National Oceanic Atmospheric Association website); cow trails (ph. Herzi Pinki, LiDAR: LiDAR Laserscanning-Geodaten Kanton Zürich, Amt für Raumentwicklung Geoinformation GIS-Produkte); rice terraces in the Philippines (University of the Philippines TCAGP); Bingham Canyon copper mine, UT, USA (ph. Spencer Musick; LiDAR: MNTOP ® ); agricultural ditch in the Netherlands (ph. Tup Wanders, LiDAR: Dutch National Spatial Data Infrastructure – PDOK); the Mittellandkanal, the longest artificial waterway in Germany (LiDAR: Geschäftsstelle des IMA GDI Nordrhein-Westfalen); riverbank in Italy (Google ©2017; LiDAR: Italian Ministry of Environment); Leech Lake Minnesota (LiDAR: MNTOP ® ); constructed wetland in Northern Italy (Ph Adige Euganeo; LiDAR: Italian Ministry of Environment); Nagia Grom war trenches in northern Italy (ph. Kevin1971; LiDAR: Autonomous Province of Trento). EXCERPT #VT3DXX p. 5 layering of these sociocultural fingerprints over landscapes over time, and their interactions with each other and the natural geomorphic processes that simultaneously shape them, combine to produce the landforms that cover most of Earth’s terrestrial surface today. DOCUMENT #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology SECTION #J98VPL 4.2 From features to fingerprints EXCERPT #32WT32 p. 20 Although anthropogenic features can increasingly be detected through remote sensing and distinguished from natural features as a function EXCERPT #UMTTKT p. 20 of their shape and material composition, a separate process of anthropogenic landscape interpretation is needed to understand their sociocultural and functional identity and their relation to the sociocultural processes that formed them – the basis both for feature classification and labelling and for the interpretation of features across landscapes and regions to identify the sociocultural fingerprints of societies. Automated feature classification is now increasingly capable of identifying classes of relatively homogeneous 3D entities (Figure 3(d)), but without further understanding of their sociocultural functions, such as habitation, symbolic culture or water infrastructure, these classifications remain purely geometric, and feature shape can at times be an unreliable indicator of function. Nevertheless, there is growing technological capacity for defining feature templates describing the geometry of specific anthropogenic feature classes, thereby enabling automated feature function identification and labelling using template matching (Schneider et al., 2015), object-oriented techniques (Blaschke et al., 2014) and/or machine learning approaches (Valentine and Kalnins, 2016). There is great promise in using these and other methods, including supervised feature classification leveraging spectral and geometric signatures developed by archaeologists and physical geographers with knowledge of the social-geomorphic timeline of a given landscape and its associated anthropogenic features, to train automated procedures to identify specific functional forms of anthropogenic features, such as buildings (Figure 3(e)). Caution is necessary, however, as natural landforms can have similar shapes to anthropogenic features: for example, a hearth-pit, a bomb crater and a karstic sinkhole might all have very similar geometry. EXCERPT #HL962L p. 20 The confusion of natural and anthropogenic patterns across landscapes can present similar challenges to the automated analysis of sociocultural fingerprints. A wide variety of natural spatial features have been shown to be statistically self-similar over many scales, suggesting that fractal patterns are a signature of natural geomorphic patterns (Goodchild and Mark, 1987; Rodriguez-Iturbe and Rinaldo, 1997; Tarboton et al., 1988). For example, road networks can assume dendritic forms very similar to those of river networks (Figure 7), and agricultural terraces can resemble river terraces. EXCERPT #WB36G4 p. 21 EXCERPT #4AB8PB p. 21 EXCERPT #3MNR6F p. 21 Yet, built-up environments may also possess similar structures at several different scales (Batty, 2008; Batty and Longley, 1994; Frankhauser, 2008; Thomas et al., 2008). Road networks, for example, are inherently fractal (Liu et al., 2014). Nevertheless, patterns of statistical self-similarity may yet prove capable of identifying differences between natural geomorphology and sociocultural fingerprints by developing rule-based systems for the classification of spatial-scale dependence of large-scale geomorphic patterns (Jiang and Brandt, 2016). The automated detection of larger scale patterns by aggregate assessment of feature composition and configuration across space through deep learning algorithms offers a clear way forward, analogous to progress with automated fingerprint detection in forensics (Schmidhuber, 2015). DOCUMENT #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology SECTION #TZSW59 4.3 A way forward EXCERPT #B3L8V3 p. 21 The future of anthropogenic geomorphology will depend on a level of integration between theory and methodology that goes far beyond what we have presented here. Nevertheless, the way forward is clear, requiring a focus on the broader sociocultural, spatial and temporal contexts of anthropogenic landscape formation, rather than the mere presence or absence of specific anthropogenic features. Analysing the spatial structuring of features across landscapes in relation to the sociocultural and material systems that have shaped them can be essential to determine whether features have originated naturally, have anthropogenic origins or have emerged through the interplay of social and EXCERPT #WBTCTE p. 21 natural processes. One example of this broader focus on sociocultural fingerprints is the differential patterning of urban landscapes around the world (Figure 8). Centuriation (Figure 8(a)) is typical of regions historically conquered by Romans (such as Italy (Figure 8(b)) and Spain (Figure 8(c))). In such cases, the city/agriculture follows a grid traced by extending the ancient Roman roads ( Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus of the ancient cities) into the surrounding agricultural land. Parallel secondary roads were then traced on both sides of the initial axes, dividing the territory into square areas. Residential areas within modern cities present a different structure (Figure 8(d)), where similar patterns are produced by street geometry adapted to exclude traffic at the local street level and facilitate flow at the collector and arterial levels. In such systems, major internal roads run between communities, rather than through them, and they create grid squares where the road network uses cul-de-sac streets complemented by (for example) bike and footpaths that connect the entire sector and beyond. EXCERPT #7XR6HB p. 21 Other examples of sociocultural fingerprints include the spatial patterning of waste disposal sites from informal middens to the regionally planned systems of larger scale societies (Sharma, 2010), the integration of green spaces into cities, the development of “agro-urban landscapes” integrating traditional agrarian landscape patterns within contemporary urban/industrial developments (Cavallo et al., 2016; Evans, 2016; Seto and Fragkias, 2005) and the spread of road networks (Corcoran et al., 2013; Strano et al., 2012). Even more detailed understanding of the functional roles of anthropogenic geomorphology can even enable the detection of specific cultivation practices. For example, different patterns of ditch networks (Figures 5(c) and (f)) support different cultivation practices (e.g. tobacco (Figure 5(a) and corn (Figure 5(d))), and identifying these patterns requires a deeper understanding of the sociocultural practices of the societies that formed and/ or operated them. Such an understanding, formed through careful reconstructions of the material cultures of societies across sites, is at the core of much archaeological research (Butzer, 1982b; David and Thomas, 2016). As the spatial and social scale of societies has increased, so have their capacities to reshape landforms locally, regionally and globally. Evidence already supports the hypothesis that anthropogenic transformations of land surface processes now move more of Earth's surface than any pre-existing natural process EXCERPT #QL6DJP p. 22 EXCERPT #NBXV93 p. 22 EXCERPT #PZYFMB p. 22 Figure 9 displays local-scale percentage of anthropogenic geomorphology, compared to anthropogenic biomes. The figure includes 14 panels (a-n) showing maps of different regions, a world map with location markers, and a legend. Legend: Urban Dense settlements Rice villages Irrigated villages Cropped pastoral villages Pastoral villages Rainfed villages Rainfed mosaic villages Residential irrigated cropland Residential rainfed mosaic Populated irrigated cropland Populated rainfed cropland Remote cropland Residential rangeland Populated rangeland Remote rangeland Populated forest Remote forest Wild forest Sparse trees Barren Anthropogenic geomorphology (%km 2 ) Color scale for anthropogenic geomorphology percentage: <10% 10-20% 20-30% 30-40% 40-50% 50-60% 60-70% 70-80% >80% Figure 9: Local-scale percentage of anthropogenic geomorphology, as compared to anthropogenic biomes. The figure consists of 14 panels (a-n) showing maps of different regions, a world map with location markers, and a legend. The legend includes 18 categories of anthropogenic biomes and a color scale for anthropogenic geomorphology percentage. EXCERPT #5PJHSN p. 22 Figure 9. Local-scale percentage of anthropogenic geomorphology, as compared to anthropogenic biomes (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008). Dataset credit: (a) Minnesota Geospatial Information Office (MnTOPO ® ); (b) Halifax Regional Municipality – Canada; (d) Autonomous Province of Trento (Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Italy); (e) Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK; (f) Sturelsen for Dataforsyning og Effektivisering; (g) National Land Survey Finland; (h) Sample data by the Lantmäteriet (Sweden); (c), (i), (j), (k), (l) data from CNES© Distribution Airbus DS; (m) TERN© AusCover; (n) OpenTopography Facility with support from the National Science Foundation under NSF Award Numbers 0930731 & 0930643 FAPESP grant 2009/17675-5. EXCERPT #6WNLTY p. 22 (Wilkinson and McElroy, 2007; Zalasiewicz et al., 2017). Yet, these broad estimates of anthropogenic global change demand to be assessed with the greater precision and spatial context made possible by high-resolution reconstructions of anthropogenic geomorphic changes at local and regional scales. These measurement capabilities, for example the computation of volumetric changes caused by anthropogenic reshaping of landforms (e.g. Figure 6(c)), are only increasing as a result of advances in sensor systems, computational technology and large-scale data sharing, making the prospect of quantifying processes of anthropogenic geomorphic change globally over the long term a real possibility (Tarolli et al., 2017). The prospect of global assessment of anthropogenic geomorphology is illustrated in Figure 9, examining a suite of sites around the world in which anthropogenic geomorphology has been mapped using satellite and LiDAR data available to the public as free open-data or as samples. Given that different uses of land are expected to shape different landforms differently (e.g. Sofia et al., 2014b), stratifying these observations in relation to global patterns of land use, such as the anthropogenic biomes (Figure 9), may offer a general sampling framework for the global mapping and quantification of anthropogenic geomorphic change. EXCERPT #7NQCFX p. 23 EXCERPT #Z8QZW2 p. 23 EXCERPT #7SEX3P p. 23 Anthropogenic geomorphology forms just one of many layers of the evolving geomorphic palimpsests that now cover most of Earth's dynamic terrestrial surface. Through a systematic assessment of anthropogenic geomorphology around the world and across time periods, it may yet be possible to develop a more general framework, perhaps even a predictive theory, on the geomorphological niche of societies, uniting the analysis of distinct geomorphic features to assess the evolving sociocultural fingerprints of societal change. DOCUMENT #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology SECTION #KVCHWE V Concluding remarks EXCERPT #UVYGMY p. 23 Human societies, across millennia, have reshaped Earth's geomorphology, producing distinctive anthropogenic landforms that now cover the vast extent of Earth's surface. These anthropogenic patterns directly and indirectly alter Earth surface processes while reflecting the sociocultural conditions of the societies that produced them. As a result, both archaeological and contemporary assessments of Earth's surface morphology reveal a wealth of diverse anthropogenic geomorphic features that can serve as diagnostic signatures or EXCERPT #EEPU7D p. 23 "sociocultural fingerprints" of the societies that formed them, including their interaction and communication with other societies. This paper offers a general framework aimed at integrating geophysical and archaeological approaches to observe, identify and interpret anthropogenic geomorphic features, based on their societal structure and functioning. By introducing the concept of "sociocultural fingerprints", we connect the novel Earth system processes introduced by the emergence and evolution of human societies with their continuous shaping and reshaping of Earth's geomorphology from the deep past into the foreseeable future. Building on this concept, we underline the opportunity to recognize the geomorphic signatures of sociocultural fingerprints across Earth's land surface using high-resolution remote sensing approaches combined with an empirical and theoretical framework that integrates the natural and sociocultural forces that have and will shape the landscapes of the Anthropocene. By engaging these frameworks together, the long-term dynamics of anthropogenic landscapes can be more effectively investigated and understood, towards more sustainable management of the Earth system, including its hydrosphere and lithosphere, into the deep future. ### 30. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `generate_image` ```json { "prompt": "Editorial academic cover art for a paper on procedural generation of villages on arbitrary terrain. Oblique aerial view of a steep green alpine valley where a small European village visibly emerges through computational layers: winding roads as fine luminous curves, irregular land parcels as subtle geometric outlines, and clustered slope-adapted houses around a church. Blend realistic terrain rendering with elegant algorithmic overlays and interest-map contours. Sophisticated, restrained palette of moss green, slate blue, warm terracotta, and cream; clean composition, strong depth, no text, no logos, portrait book-cover format." } ``` #### Tool call: `generate_image` ```json { "prompt": "Editorial academic cover art for a geomorphology paper on legacy sediment and episodic anthropogenic deposition. A dramatic cutaway river valley showing layered floodplain stratigraphy: dark buried pre-disturbance soil beneath thick ochre and pale-gold alluvial deposits, an incised blue river channel reworking terraces, and faint historical traces of deforestation, agriculture, logging, and mining upstream. Emphasize an aggradation–degradation sequence and landscape memory across time. Scientific yet poetic, tactile sediment textures, muted earth tones with cool blue water, no text, no labels, no logos, portrait book-cover format." } ``` #### Tool call: `generate_image` ```json { "prompt": "Editorial academic cover art for a paper on anthropogenic geomorphology and sociocultural fingerprints. High-resolution LiDAR-style aerial terrain rendered as a luminous topographic palimpsest, where roads, terraces, canals, settlements, field boundaries, earthworks, and ancient monuments overlap across centuries like a human fingerprint embedded in the land. Natural ridges and drainage networks interweave with geometric human patterns; transition from archaeological traces to modern infrastructure. Elegant scientific visualization, charcoal and deep teal terrain with copper and gold feature lines, no text, no logos, portrait book-cover format." } ``` ### 31. Tool result: generate_image GENERATED IMAGE #3V5HCX URL: /images/3V5HCX Model: gpt-image-2 Prompt: Editorial academic cover art for a paper on procedural generation of villages on arbitrary terrain. Oblique aerial view of a steep green alpine valley where a small European village visibly emerges through computational layers: winding roads as fine luminous curves, irregular land parcels as subtle geometric outlines, and clustered slope-adapted houses around a church. Blend realistic terrain rendering with elegant algorithmic overlays and interest-map contours. Sophisticated, restrained palette of moss green, slate blue, warm terracotta, and cream; clean composition, strong depth, no text, no logos, portrait book-cover format. ### 32. Tool result: generate_image GENERATED IMAGE #PCUK48 URL: /images/PCUK48 Model: gpt-image-2 Prompt: Editorial academic cover art for a geomorphology paper on legacy sediment and episodic anthropogenic deposition. A dramatic cutaway river valley showing layered floodplain stratigraphy: dark buried pre-disturbance soil beneath thick ochre and pale-gold alluvial deposits, an incised blue river channel reworking terraces, and faint historical traces of deforestation, agriculture, logging, and mining upstream. Emphasize an aggradation–degradation sequence and landscape memory across time. Scientific yet poetic, tactile sediment textures, muted earth tones with cool blue water, no text, no labels, no logos, portrait book-cover format. ### 33. Tool result: generate_image GENERATED IMAGE #QZWH36 URL: /images/QZWH36 Model: gpt-image-2 Prompt: Editorial academic cover art for a paper on anthropogenic geomorphology and sociocultural fingerprints. High-resolution LiDAR-style aerial terrain rendered as a luminous topographic palimpsest, where roads, terraces, canals, settlements, field boundaries, earthworks, and ancient monuments overlap across centuries like a human fingerprint embedded in the land. Natural ridges and drainage networks interweave with geometric human patterns; transition from archaeological traces to modern infrastructure. Elegant scientific visualization, charcoal and deep teal terrain with copper and gold feature lines, no text, no logos, portrait book-cover format. ### 34. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `update_document_metadata` ```json { "cover_image_id": "3V5HCX", "document_id": "EARFEK", "micro_abstract": "Presents a three-stage procedural model that grows terrain-responsive village roads and settlements, partitions land into plausible parcels, and generates slope-adapted buildings with open shape grammars." } ``` #### Tool call: `update_document_metadata` ```json { "cover_image_id": "PCUK48", "document_id": "K82AS7", "micro_abstract": "Broadens legacy sediment to episodically produced anthropogenic alluvium and colluvium, and explains its deposition, storage, and remobilization through sediment delivery–transport capacity dynamics." } ``` #### Tool call: `update_document_metadata` ```json { "cover_image_id": "QZWH36", "document_id": "2284QZ", "micro_abstract": "Integrates geomorphology, archaeology, and high-resolution remote sensing into a framework for reading anthropogenic landforms as landscape-scale sociocultural fingerprints." } ``` ### 35. Tool result: update_document_metadata Updated metadata for #EARFEK: cover_image_id, micro_abstract ### 36. Tool result: update_document_metadata Updated metadata for #K82AS7: cover_image_id, micro_abstract ### 37. Tool result: update_document_metadata Updated metadata for #2284QZ: cover_image_id, micro_abstract ### 38. Assistant Added tailored microabstracts and generated cover art for all three papers: - **Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains** — #EARFEK Cover: #3V5HCX - **Legacy sediment** — #K82AS7 Cover: #PCUK48 - **From features to fingerprints** — #2284QZ Cover: #QZWH36 Each cover is now associated with its document, and the microabstracts are saved in the document metadata. ### 39. User tell me the interesting things about each one ### 40. Assistant ## 1. *Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains* — #EARFEK The most interesting move is that the village is modeled as a **historical growth process**, not as a finished urban plan. - **Roads and settlement co-evolve.** New buildings are attracted to existing roads, while each new building can extend the road network. This produces scattered, irregular settlements rather than city-like blocks (#2H4TL6, #2LHPV2). - **Location is treated as a bundle of competing interests.** Buildings respond differently to slope, water, roads, neighbors, religious buildings, fortifications, and geographical prominence. A farm, church, and fisherman’s house therefore “read” the same terrain differently (#P6XUT4, #N9CNZB, #TAV8NX). - **Parcel boundaries emerge from roads and terrain.** Instead of using regular Voronoi cells, the model grows parcels outward from roads with anisotropic costs, allowing slope and other barriers to shape their geometry (#B3SWSM, #7NDG5K). - **Architecture adapts after placement.** Its “open shape grammar” can move, reshape, or abandon windows and doors when standard grammar rules would make them collide with sloping ground (#68ZUQR, #BGRWGE). - **There is a useful realism–control tension.** The system generates convincing diversity, but requires roughly 150 parameters per village type, making its apparent organic emergence heavily dependent on expert calibration (#EYJ8SX). The broader insight is that plausible settlement form can emerge from **localized decisions, environmental constraints, and path dependence**, rather than from a centralized master plan. ## 2. *Legacy sediment* — #K82AS7 James’s key contribution is to make “legacy sediment” a much broader and more dynamic concept than simply post-settlement floodplain deposits. - **Legacy sediment is defined by causation and episodicity, not location.** It includes anthropogenically accelerated alluvium and colluvium produced by agriculture, logging, mining, road construction, grazing, or urbanization—across different continents and historical periods (#D5YT7W, #WF93WF). - **Not all historical sediment is legacy sediment.** Human activity must have caused a substantial, episodic acceleration in sedimentation; otherwise the category becomes so broad that it loses explanatory value (#6MAQBD). - **The paper offers a compact process model.** Deposition and preservation become likely when sediment delivery exceeds transport capacity, expressed through the ratio $D_s/T_c>1$; when $D_s/T_c<1$, stored sediment is more likely to be recruited and transported (#XXU68Z). - **Landscapes retain delayed memories of disturbance.** Intensive land use may first aggrade a channel and bury its floodplain; later reductions in sediment supply cause incision, but the remaining terraces can continue releasing sediment for centuries (#3YVSD7, #5KWFJP). - **This complicates restoration baselines.** A river may have returned to an earlier bed elevation while still being surrounded by large volumes of anthropogenic sediment. Its present behavior therefore reflects both current conditions and inherited material from earlier land use (#CZKRYZ). Its most powerful idea is **temporal connectivity**: past human disturbances remain physically active long after the original activity has stopped. ## 3. *From Features to Fingerprints* — #2284QZ This paper shifts attention from isolated human-made landforms to the **landscape-scale patterns produced by whole societies**. - **Anthropogenic landscapes are palimpsests.** Roads, fields, settlements, terraces, monuments, and infrastructure are repeatedly inherited, overwritten, and reworked by later societies and by natural processes (#EBG5LP). - **Individual features combine into “sociocultural fingerprints.”** A road or ditch may be ambiguous by itself, but the composition and spatial arrangement of many features can reveal characteristic systems of habitation, subsistence, transport, symbolism, warfare, or water management (#LQCHXR, #2YJDU2). - **Human geomorphology scales with social organization and energy use.** As societies become larger and gain access to animal labor, fossil fuels, and machinery, their landforms generally become larger, more complex, and more durable (#UGW432, #HJJLLM). - **Remote sensing detects form, but not necessarily meaning.** LiDAR, photogrammetry, and machine learning can identify geometric objects, yet similar forms may have very different origins—a depression could be a hearth, bomb crater, or sinkhole (#UMTTKT). - **Context is therefore the diagnostic key.** The authors argue that interpretation should focus on how features are spatially organized and related to sociocultural systems, rather than merely recording whether individual anthropogenic features are present (#B3L8V3). - **The long-term ambition is unusually large.** Systematic global mapping might support a predictive theory of the “geomorphological niche” of societies: how different social systems characteristically reshape Earth’s surface (#7SEX3P). The central insight is that landscapes can be read almost like archaeological fingerprints—but only by combining **geometry, spatial pattern, history, and social interpretation**. Taken together, the three papers describe human landscapes at complementary scales: **local generative decisions** in village growth, **long-lived material consequences** in sediment systems, and **society-wide spatial signatures** across entire landscapes. ### 41. User if you look at the other papers in the corpus tell me some throughlines and interesting things ### 42. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `list_documents` ```json {} ``` ### 43. Tool result: list_documents FOLDERS - Living Structure, Wholeness & Beauty - Procedural Generation & Co-Creation - Roads, Trails & Movement - Terrain, Hydrology & Erosion - Water Simulation & Rendering Living Structure, Wholeness & Beauty (8) - #MH5J8D Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure - 2025 | Bin Jiang | AI | 12 pp. | doi:10.3390/ai6040074 Micro abstract: Presents Beautimeter, a GPT-based tool that scores buildings and urban scenes against Christopher Alexander’s 15 properties of living structure to assess their coherence and beauty. - #XW22YY Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods - 2005 | Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt | Center for Environmental Structure | 21 pp. Micro abstract: Argues that living neighborhoods arise from generative codes: ordered, participatory steps that let buildings and public spaces unfold from local people, land, and context. - #SKRF4C Geography as a Science of the Earth’s Surface Founded on the Third View of Space - 2022 | Bin Jiang | Annals of GIS | 14 pp. | doi:10.1080/19475683.2021.1966502 Micro abstract: Recasts geography around an organismic view of space, using scaling and spatial dependence to understand—and deliberately create—places with greater living structure. - #PXG56P Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole - 2009 | Christopher Alexander | Unpublished manuscript | 66 pp. Micro abstract: Proposes harmony-seeking computation as a creative process that repeatedly strengthens latent centers in a configuration while preserving and deepening the larger whole. - #MJKTBB Living Images: A Recursive Approach to Computing the Structural Beauty of Images or the Livingness of Space - 2023 | Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke | Annals of the American Association of Geographers | 19 pp. | doi:10.1080/24694452.2023.2178376 Micro abstract: Measures an image’s structural beauty by recursively extracting its nested substructures, revealing a compact hierarchy that also captures visual saliency. - #3XSLTA Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image - 2021 | Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke | Journal of Imaging | 15 pp. | doi:10.3390/jimaging7050078 Micro abstract: Proposes a quantitative measure of structural beauty based on how many substructures an image contains and how strongly they form a hierarchy across scales. - #ZU8GZV Structure-Preserving Transformations - 2002 | Christopher Alexander | The Nature of Order, Book Two: The Process of Creating Life | 4 pp. | doi:10.2307/j.ctv27ftw6c.5 Micro abstract: Explains structure-preserving transformations: incremental changes that extend the centers and relationships already present in a place rather than weakening its wholeness. - #BYG3BQ Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space - 2015 | Bin Jiang | International Journal of Geographical Information Science | 14 pp. | doi:10.1080/13658816.2015.1038542 Micro abstract: Models spatial wholeness as a hierarchical graph of mutually reinforcing centers, using PageRank and scaling depth to quantify the life of parts and wholes. Procedural Generation & Co-Creation (6) - #4TH488 Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation - 2018 | Antonios Liapis, G. Michael Youngblood, Jichen Zhu, Rafael Bidarra, Sebastian Risi | 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) | 8 pp. | doi:10.1109/CIG.2018.8490433 Micro abstract: Defines explainable AI for game designers, mapping co-creative systems by their explainability, initiative, and domain overlap so explanations serve concrete design tasks. - #9NQ94D Extracting Physics from Blended Platformer Game Levels - 2020 | Adam Summerville, Anurag Sarkar, Joseph C. Osborn, Sam Snodgrass | Joint Proceedings of the AIIDE 2020 Workshops (CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2862) | 7 pp. Micro abstract: Infers playable jump physics from generated platformer levels, including hybrid physics models for levels that blend the geometry and style of multiple games. - #7GR3AQ Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity - 2019 | Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius | 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) | 8 pp. | doi:10.1109/CIG.2019.8848053 Micro abstract: Argues for quality-diversity algorithms in procedural generation, producing broad collections of varied, playable content while exposing the design space for exploration and co-creation. - #CQBDX4 Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) - 2018 | Aaron Isaksen, Adam Summerville, Amy K. Hoover, Andy Nealen, Christoffer Holmgård, Julian Togelius, Matthew Guzdial, Sam Snodgrass | IEEE Transactions on Games | 15 pp. | doi:10.1109/TG.2018.2846639 Micro abstract: Defines and surveys PCGML: generating functional game content directly from models trained on existing examples, with uses spanning creation, completion, repair, critique, and compression. - #WZ8DHP Runtime Evaluation of Procedural Content Generation in an Endless Runner Game Using Autonomous Agents - 2026 | Rishabh Kar | arXiv | 25 pp. | doi:10.48550/arXiv.2605.01783 Micro abstract: Integrates procedural generation and validation in an endless runner, using aerial and ground agents to detect blocked or unnavigable content before the player reaches it. - #NRBMD5 Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry - 2020 | Frederic Fol Leymarie, Gorm Lai, William Latham | Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '20) | 4 pp. | doi:10.1145/3402942.3402946 Micro abstract: Distills three requirements for industry-friendly co-creative PCG tools: preserve designer control, keep feedback loops short, and fit into existing production pipelines. Roads, Trails & Movement (7) - #G3TBNG A Sequential Two-Step Algorithm for Fast Generation of Vehicle Racing Trajectories - 2016 | J. Christian Gerdes, John Subosits, Nitin R. Kapania | Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control | 12 pp. | doi:10.1115/1.4033311 Micro abstract: Generates near-optimal racing trajectories quickly by alternating between a minimum-time speed profile and a convex path update that reduces curvature. - #B6P8L4 Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems - 1997 | Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár | Physical Review E | 34 pp. | doi:10.1103/physreve.56.2527 Micro abstract: Models trail systems as self-organization: walkers reinforce attractive routes while unused traces fade, producing dendritic ant trails and low-detour pedestrian networks. - #V4TQYB Interactive procedural street modeling - 2008 | Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka | ACM Transactions on Graphics | 10 pp. | doi:10.1145/1360612.1360702 Micro abstract: Lets designers generate and edit large street networks through tensor fields, combining procedural speed with brush-like global and local control over street patterns. - #UYLTYJ Modelling the Evolution of Human Trail Systems - 1997 | Dirk Helbing, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár | Nature | 11 pp. | doi:10.1038/40353 Micro abstract: Shows how pedestrian trails emerge through feedback between destination-seeking walkers, existing paths, and vegetation recovery, yielding a compromise between directness and shared infrastructure. - #GY93FG Mountain Trail Formation and the Active Walker Model - 2009 | J. P. Hague, S. J. Gilks | International Journal of Modern Physics C | 22 pp. | doi:10.1142/S0129183109014059 Micro abstract: Extends the active-walker model to steep terrain, explaining zigzag mountain trails through slope avoidance, directional persistence, and mutual reinforcement by ascending and descending walkers. - #LXV9AT Principles of Trail Layout and Design - 2019 | California State Parks | California State Parks Trails Handbook | 64 pp. Micro abstract: A field-oriented guide to durable trail design, emphasizing curvilinear alignment, natural drainage, sustainable grades, control points, and close reading of landform and soils. - #XDEFZS Procedural Generation of Roads - 2010 | A. Peytavie, E. Galin, E. Guérin, N. Maréchal | Computer Graphics Forum | 10 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01612.x Micro abstract: Automatically routes and constructs roads with an anisotropic shortest-path method that weighs slope and obstacles while treating surface segments, bridges, and tunnels consistently. Terrain, Hydrology & Erosion (6) - #NV2YRW FastFlow: GPU Acceleration of Flow and Depression Routing for Landscape Simulation - 2024 | Aryamaan Jain, Bernhard Kerbl, Brandon Finley, Guillaume Cordonnier, James Gain | Computer Graphics Forum | 13 pp. | doi:10.1111/cgf.15243 Micro abstract: A GPU framework for routing surface flow through terrain and its depressions fast enough to make erosion, river, lake, and ecosystem simulations interactive. - #96ZMGK Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion - 2016 | Adrien Peytavie, Bedrich Benes, Guillaume Cordonnier, Jean Braun, Marie-Paule Cani, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin | Computer Graphics Forum | 11 pp. | doi:10.1111/cgf.12820 Micro abstract: Generates large, controllable mountain terrains by coupling user-painted tectonic uplift with fluvial erosion, then turning the resulting stream graph into detailed landforms. - #DWXKYQ Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation - 2024 | Boris Gailleton, Guillaume Cordonnier, Petros Tzathas, Philippe Steer | Computer Graphics Forum | 14 pp. | doi:10.1111/cgf.15033 Micro abstract: Turns the stream power law into an interactive terrain tool, replacing thousands of erosion time steps with analytical solutions and a direct control for landscape age. - #MTDKDE Priority-Flood: An Optimal Depression-Filling and Watershed-Labeling Algorithm for Digital Elevation Models - 2014 | Clarence Lehman, David Mulla, Richard Barnes | Computers & Geosciences | 17 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.cageo.2013.04.024 Micro abstract: Introduces Priority-Flood, a simple, optimal algorithm that removes drainage-blocking depressions from elevation models and can also derive watersheds and flow directions. - #AK7NGE Procedural Riverscapes - 2019 | A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial | Computer Graphics Forum | 12 pp. | doi:10.1111/cgf.13814 Micro abstract: Builds editable, animated riverscapes from bare terrain by carving hydrologically plausible channels and blending real-time procedural water primitives instead of simulating fluids. - #DMTA8Y Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology - 2013 | Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin | ACM Transactions on Graphics | 10 pp. | doi:10.1145/2461912.2461996 Micro abstract: Generates controllable, multiscale terrain from a sketched drainage network, representing rivers and landforms as an editable hierarchy of continuous procedural primitives. Water Simulation & Rendering (12) - #RBS5K6 A Layered Particle-Based Fluid Model for Real-Time Rendering of Water - 2010 | Daniel Scherzer, Florian Bagar, Michael Wimmer | Computer Graphics Forum | 7 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01734.x Micro abstract: Renders particle-based water and volumetric foam in real time using perspective-aware surface smoothing, physically guided foam formation, and layered depth compositing. - #C4AY2M A Survey of Ocean Simulation and Rendering Techniques in Computer Graphics - 2011 | B. Crespin, D. Ghazanfarpour, E. Darles, J.-C. Gonzato | Computer Graphics Forum | 17 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01828.x Micro abstract: Surveys ocean graphics from spectral deep-water models to near-shore fluid simulation, then covers the foam, spray, and light transport needed for convincing rendering. - #WZMZGY Advected river textures - 2009 | Dirk Arnold, Stephen Brooks, Tim Burrell | Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds | 11 pp. | doi:10.1002/cav.288 Micro abstract: Combines a 2D Navier–Stokes solver, hydrostatic pressure columns, and advected procedural textures to render detailed, terrain-responsive rivers at real-time frame rates. - #92XRH7 Lagrangian Texture Advection: Preserving both Spectrum and Velocity Field - 2011 | Qizhi Yu, E. Bruneton, F. Neyret, N. Holzschuch | IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics | 13 pp. | doi:10.1109/tvcg.2010.263 Micro abstract: Advects fluid textures with deformable particle grids, preserving both the input texture’s visual spectrum and exact motion along the velocity field without cumulative stretching. - #8SERGP Real-time Breaking Waves for Shallow Water Simulations - 2007 | Markus Gross, Matthias Müller-Fischer, Nils Thürey, Simon Schirm | 15th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (Pacific Graphics 2007) | 8 pp. | doi:10.1109/PG.2007.33 Micro abstract: Adds real-time overturning waves to shallow-water heightfields by detecting steep fronts and spawning connected particle sheets that collapse into splashes and foam. - #CWC7H9 Real-time Rendering of Enhanced Shallow Water Fluid Simulations - 2013 | Antonio Susín, Jesús Ojeda | Computers & Graphics | 9 pp. Micro abstract: Builds a real-time rendering pipeline for shallow-water simulations, adding fine surface detail, advected foam, photon-based caustics, and screen-space reflection and refraction. - #MVUJ8Z Real-time Rendering of River Networks - 2010 | Quintijn Hendrickx, Rafael Bidarra, Ruben M. Smelik | Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games | 1 pp. Micro abstract: Renders branching river networks efficiently with quadratic Bézier curves, GPU distance fields, and streaming normal maps instead of dense geometry or particle simulation. - #5MGCZ5 Real-time River Representation by Dynamic Control of Data on Waves - 2008 | Makoto Kosugi, Nobuhiko Mukai, Yasuhiro Kato | 4 pp. | doi:10.3169/itej.62.2063 Micro abstract: Dynamically switches river-wave models by viewing distance, preserving nearby reflection and wave detail while retaining wind-driven motion across the full landscape. - #XDESU9 Scalable real‐time animation of rivers - 2009 | Eric Bruneton, Fabrice Neyret, Nicolas Holzschuch, Qizhi Yu | Computer Graphics Forum | 11 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01363.x Micro abstract: Animates rivers across vast terrains by computing steady flow locally and advecting fine surface detail only where visible, at a screen-space sampling density. - #869NHK Very Fast Real-Time Ocean Wave Foam Rendering Using Halftoning - 2011 | Ian Parberry, Jennifer R. Alford, Mary Yingst | Proceedings of the 6th International North American Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation (GAMEON-NA) | 7 pp. Micro abstract: Uses a spectrally controlled halftone mask to make texture-based ocean foam dissipate as clumped bubbles that pop, rather than merely fading transparently. - #A2QB8L Water Flow in Portal 2 - 2010 | Alex Vlachos | ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Course: Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games | 54 pp. Micro abstract: Explains Portal 2’s production-friendly water shader: artist-painted flow maps advect layered normal maps, while offsets and noise suppress repetition and pulsing on limited hardware. - #PBM2TC Water surface wavelets - 2018 | Chris Wojtan, Matthias Müller-Fischer, Miles Macklin, Nuttapong Chentanez, Stefan Jeschke, Tomáš Skřivan | ACM Transactions on Graphics | 13 pp. | doi:10.1145/3197517.3201336 Micro abstract: Represents water waves as spatially varying directional amplitudes, enabling vast interactive simulations with fine detail, moving obstacles, solid coupling, and direct artistic control. Unfiled (6) - #GANFP9 A Fundamental Duality in the Mathematical and Natural Sciences: From Logic to Biology - 2024 | David Ellerman | 53 pp. Micro abstract: Traces an overlooked subset–partition duality—from logic and category theory through entropy and quantum indefiniteness to selectionist and generative mechanisms in biology. - #2284QZ From features to fingerprints: A general diagnostic framework for anthropogenic geomorphology - 2019 | Damian Evans, Erle C Ellis, Giulia Sofia, Paolo Tarolli, Wenfang Cao | Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment | 34 pp. | doi:10.1177/0309133318825284 Micro abstract: Integrates geomorphology, archaeology, and high-resolution remote sensing into a framework for reading anthropogenic landforms as landscape-scale sociocultural fingerprints. - #K82AS7 Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment - 2013 | L. Allan James | Anthropocene | 11 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.ancene.2013.04.001 Micro abstract: Broadens legacy sediment to episodically produced anthropogenic alluvium and colluvium, and explains its deposition, storage, and remobilization through sediment delivery–transport capacity dynamics. - #C8FHDZ On implication and negation in partition logic - 2025 | , David Ellerman | Open Journal of Mathematical Sciences | 9 pp. | doi:10.30538/oms2025.0250 Micro abstract: Develops implication as a refinement-sensitive operation on set partitions, showing how relative negation yields local Boolean cores within the non-distributive algebra of partitions. - #EARFEK Procedural Generation of Villages on Arbitrary Terrains - 2012 | Adrien Bernhardt, Adrien Peytavie, Arnaud Emilien, Eric Galin, Marie-Paule Cani | The Visual Computer | 10 pp. | doi:10.1007/s00371-012-0699-7 Micro abstract: Presents a three-stage procedural model that grows terrain-responsive village roads and settlements, partitions land into plausible parcels, and generates slope-adapted buildings with open shape grammars. - #ARP5U7 The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries - 1983 | A. A. D. Peatfield | The Annual of the British School at Athens | 8 pp. | doi:10.1017/s0068245400019729 Micro abstract: Argues that Minoan peak sanctuaries were chosen for visibility and proximity to local settlements, forming a beacon-like sacred network whose contraction tracked settlement abandonment rather than cultic collapse. ### 44. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "self organization feedback walkers trails reinforcement path formation" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "structure-preserving transformations generative sequence local adaptation whole centers" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "designer control mixed initiative explainability short feedback loop quality diversity" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "terrain hydrology procedural generation drainage network erosion user control" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "hierarchy scaling living structure wholeness graph beauty" } ``` ### 45. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 21 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #T6PSLK V. SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK #DTECU9 A. Trail formation as a self-organization phenomenon Matching excerpt #653HKK: With respect to the formation of trunk trails, our model indicates that these patterns can be obtained also under the restrictions, that (i) no visual navigation and internal storage of information is provided, (ii) in the beginning, no chemical signposts exist which lead the ants to the food sources and afterwards back to the nest. Rather, the formation of trail systems can be described as a process of self-organization. Based on the interactions of the active walkers on a local or ‘microscopic’ level, the emergence of a global or ‘macroscopic’ structure occurs. The basic interaction between the active walkers can be considered as indirect communication mediated by an external storage medium [43,63]. This is a collective process in which all active walkers are involved. The information which an active walker produces in terms of chemical markings affects the behaviors of the others. It can be amplified during the evolution process or disappear again, thus leading to a correlation between the information generated and to the self-organization of the walkers on a spatial level. 2. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 3 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #TTL9MC I. INTRODUCTION Matching excerpt #E8PUZ9: In order to simulate this process, we propose here a particle-based, multi-agent approach to structure formation, which belongs to the class of active walker models . Like random walkers, active walkers are subject to fluctuations and influences of their environment. However, they are additionally able to locally change their environment, e.g. by altering an environmental potential, which in turn influences their further movement and their behavior. In particular, changes produced by some walkers can influence other walkers. Hence, the non-linear feedback can be interpreted as an indirect interaction between the active walkers via environmental changes, which may lead to the self-organization of spatial structures. 3. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 2 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #TTL9MC I. INTRODUCTION Matching excerpt #KXXUJY: As our experience tells us, trails are adapted to the requirements of their users. In the course of time, frequently used trails become more developed, making them more attractive, whereas rarely used trails vanish again. Trails with large detours become optimized by creating shortcuts. New destinations or entry points are connected to an existing trail system. These dynamical processes occur basically without any common planning or direct communication among the users. Instead, the adaptation process can be understood as a self-organization phenomenon, resulting from the non-linear feedback between the users and the trails [35]. 4. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 7 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #P3AR99 III. TRUNK TRAIL FORMATION BY ANTS Matching excerpt #JF22FC: We will neglect these abilities, in order to show that they are not necessary for trail formation. The active walkers in our model merely count on the local information provided by the chemical trail, in order to guide themselves. They do not have additional navigation or information processing capabilities, and are not subject to long-range attracting forces to the food sources or to the nest. Hence, the formation of trunk trails in the following model is clearly a self-organizing process, based on the local interactions of the walkers [51]. 5. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 3 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #TTL9MC I. INTRODUCTION Matching excerpt #T9CE9W: In Section II, the active walker model for trail formation is formulated in terms of a Langevin equation for the movement of the walkers, an equation for environmental changes, and a relation describing the orientation of the walkers with respect to existing trails. As one application of the model, Section III describes the formation of trunk trails in ant colonies, which are commonly used to exploit food sources. As a second application, in Section IV the evolution of pedestrian trail systems is modelled. Both Sections III and IV present a comparison of computational results with real trail systems, indicating a good agreement between model and empirical facts. In Section IV.A, the equations for pedestrian trail systems are scaled to dimensionless equations, in order to demonstrate that the evolving trail systems are (apart from the boundary conditions) only determined by two parameters. In Section IV.B, a macroscopic formulation of human trail formation is derived from the microscopic equations, allowing analytical investigations and an efficient calculation of the stationary solution by a self-consistent field method. Our conclusions and an outlook, which suggests an application of the model to the optimization of trail systems, are presented in Section V. 6. Source: Mountain Trail Formation and the Active Walker Model (#GY93FG), J. P. Hague, S. J. Gilks, p. 16 Context: #G4BEE9 Mountain trail formation and the active walker model #HX4K49 6. Summary Matching excerpt #S2VCY4: We have developed an extension to the active walker model to handle the formation of trails on inclines. Our simulations are in qualitative agreement with empirical observations of mountain path formations. Such trails are characterized by a zig-zag pattern. Our extension took account of the inability of walkers to walk directly up or down very steep gradients. We have shown that some supplementary rules need to be included in the active walker model to achieve features consistent with mountain trails. Those additional rules are that (a) the consecutive steps of walkers tend to be in the same direction and that (b) there is a maximum permitted angle of motion down an incline to avoid falling and (c) there is a maximum angle of ascent for physiological reasons such as limited ankle flexibility. When rules to encourage consecutive steps are not present, we find that walkers travel in an unusual manner, only taking a single step before changing direction. We also found that the presence of walkers moving both uphill and downhill (with different forbidden angles) is important for forming well defined zig-zag paths. Walkers traveling downhill with a larger forbidden angle are constrained to form zigzags but create rather diffuse paths unless those paths are complemented by walkers traveling uphill. This happens because the walkers with more angular freedom become attracted to and reinforce the paths. 7. Source: Mountain Trail Formation and the Active Walker Model (#GY93FG), J. P. Hague, S. J. Gilks, p. 0 Context: #G4BEE9 Mountain trail formation and the active walker model #2F9V87 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #NDVFZG: In principle, there are a huge number of possible routes to be explored when choosing a path, and walkers could take any course between a starting point and a destination. A first approximation to the most probable path is a straight line between the initial and destination points (unless there are obstacles in the way). However, studies of trails using the active walker model have shown that the detailed patterns of paths form from a counterpoint between the desire to walk on well trodden paths, and the shortest route to be found by traveling directly between the origin and destination 7,9 . Well-trodden paths are likely to be favored by pedestrians because of reduced energy usage when compared, for example, to walking through long grass. This preference may be largely psychological, as internet based experiments in a virtual environment have also shown that 'walkers' tend to favor well-used 'paths' 4,5 . The preference to walk on regularly used paths leads to an effective interaction between past and present walkers, indicating that there is interesting physics involved in the formation of such trails. 8. Source: Modelling the Evolution of Human Trail Systems (#UYLTYJ), Dirk Helbing, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 0 Context: #BSSYS2 Modelling the Evolution of Human Trail Systems Matching excerpt #CR8C3T: Many human social phenomena, such as cooperation [1–3], the growth of settlements [4], traffic dynamics [5–7] and pedestrian movement [7–10], appear to be accessible to mathematical descriptions that invoke self-organization [11,12]. Here we develop a model of pedestrian motion to explore the evolution of trails in urban green spaces such as parks. Our aim is to address such questions as what the topological structures of these trail systems are [13], and whether optimal path systems can be predicted for urban planning. We use an ‘active walker’ model [14–19] that takes into account pedestrian motion and orientation and the concomitant feedbacks with the surrounding environment. Such models have previously been applied to the study of complex structure formation in physical [14–16], chemical [17] and biological [18,19] systems. We find that our model is able to reproduce many of the observed large-scale spatial features of trail systems. Approximate matches 1. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 6 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #YEVN37 II. ACTIVE WALKER MODEL OF TRAIL FORMATION Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #3YJ2PE: Therefore, the mechanism of trail formation is based on some kind of agglomeration process , which is delocalized due to the directedness of the walkers' motion. Starting with a plain, spatially homogeneous ground, the walkers will move arbitrarily. However, by continuously leaving markings, they produce trails which have an attractive effect on nearby walkers. Thus, the agents begin to use already existing trails after some time. By this, a kind of selection process between trails occurs (cf. [43]): Frequently used trails are reinforced, which makes them even more attractive, whereas rarely used trails may vanish again. The trails begin to bundle, especially where different trails meet or intersect. Therefore, even walkers with different entry points and destinations use and maintain common parts of the trail system. 2. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 3 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #TTL9MC I. INTRODUCTION Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #8TZ5BY: Active walker models have proved their versatility in a variety of applications, such as formation of complex structures [36–42], pattern formation in physico-chemical systems [43–46], aggregation in biological [47,48] or urban [49] systems, and generation of directed motion [50,51]. The approach provides a quite stable and fast numerical algorithm for simulating processes involving large density gradients, and it is applicable also in cases where only small particle numbers govern the structure formation. In particular, the active walker model is applicable to processes of pattern formation which are intrinsically determined by the history of their creation, such as the formation of trail systems, discussed in this paper. 3. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 2 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #TTL9MC I. INTRODUCTION Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #KXXUJY: As our experience tells us, trails are adapted to the requirements of their users. In the course of time, frequently used trails become more developed, making them more attractive, whereas rarely used trails vanish again. Trails with large detours become optimized by creating shortcuts. New destinations or entry points are connected to an existing trail system. These dynamical processes occur basically without any common planning or direct communication among the users. Instead, the adaptation process can be understood as a self-organization phenomenon, resulting from the non-linear feedback between the users and the trails [35]. 4. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 11 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #3WQXTG IV. HUMAN TRAIL FORMATION Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #JN4H6B: Trail formation by pedestrians has been investigated only very recently [60]. It can be interpreted as a complex interplay between pedestrian motion, human orientation, and environmental changes: On the one hand, pedestrians tend to take the shortest way to their destination. On the other hand, they avoid to walk on bumpy ground, since this is uncomfortable. Therefore, they prefer to use existing trails, but they build a new shortcut, if the relative detour would be too large. In the latter case they generate a new trail, since footprints clear some vegetation. Examples of the resulting trail systems can be found in green areas, like public parks (cf. Fig. 3). 5. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 21 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #T6PSLK V. SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK #DTECU9 A. Trail formation as a self-organization phenomenon Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #653HKK: With respect to the formation of trunk trails, our model indicates that these patterns can be obtained also under the restrictions, that (i) no visual navigation and internal storage of information is provided, (ii) in the beginning, no chemical signposts exist which lead the ants to the food sources and afterwards back to the nest. Rather, the formation of trail systems can be described as a process of self-organization. Based on the interactions of the active walkers on a local or ‘microscopic’ level, the emergence of a global or ‘macroscopic’ structure occurs. The basic interaction between the active walkers can be considered as indirect communication mediated by an external storage medium [43,63]. This is a collective process in which all active walkers are involved. The information which an active walker produces in terms of chemical markings affects the behaviors of the others. It can be amplified during the evolution process or disappear again, thus leading to a correlation between the information generated and to the self-organization of the walkers on a spatial level. 6. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 20 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #T6PSLK V. SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #9RBRRU: We showed that the active walker concept is suitable for modeling and understanding trail formation by pedestrians and animals. Our model turned out to be in good agreement with observations. It included an equation of motion of the walkers, an equation describing environmental changes by the markings which they leave and their decay, a relation reflecting the attractiveness of already existing trails, and an equation delineating their influence on orientation. Whereas frequently used trails are reinforced, rarely chosen trails are vanishing in the course of time. This causes a tendency of trail bundling, which can be interpreted as an agglomeration phenomenon. However, the evolving patterns are not localized since the active walkers intend to reach certain destinations, starting from their respective entry points. 7. Source: Active walker model for the formation of human and animal trail systems (#B6P8L4), Dirk Helbing, Frank Schweitzer, Joachim Keltsch, Péter Molnár, p. 0 Context: #E9C9Y2 Active Walker Model for the Formation of Human and Animal Trail Systems #4PR2LM Abstract Score: 0.021 Related excerpt #H2R66Q: Active walker models have recently proved their great value for describing the formation of clusters, periodic patterns, and spiral waves as well as the development of rivers, dielectric breakdown patterns, and many other structures. It is shown that they also allow to simulate the formation of trail systems by pedestrians and ants, yielding a better understanding of human and animal behavior. A comparison with empirical material shows a good agreement between model and reality. 8. Source: Mountain Trail Formation and the Active Walker Model (#GY93FG), J. P. Hague, S. J. Gilks, p. 0 Context: #G4BEE9 Mountain trail formation and the active walker model #2F9V87 1. Introduction Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #NDVFZG: In principle, there are a huge number of possible routes to be explored when choosing a path, and walkers could take any course between a starting point and a destination. A first approximation to the most probable path is a straight line between the initial and destination points (unless there are obstacles in the way). However, studies of trails using the active walker model have shown that the detailed patterns of paths form from a counterpoint between the desire to walk on well trodden paths, and the shortest route to be found by traveling directly between the origin and destination 7,9 . Well-trodden paths are likely to be favored by pedestrians because of reduced energy usage when compared, for example, to walking through long grass. This preference may be largely psychological, as internet based experiments in a virtual environment have also shown that 'walkers' tend to favor well-used 'paths' 4,5 . The preference to walk on regularly used paths leads to an effective interaction between past and present walkers, indicating that there is interesting physics involved in the formation of such trails. ### 46. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Alexander (2009), Harmony-Seeking Computations — reading note (#42YDX9) Matching note #42YDX9: Alexander’s unpublished 2009 manuscript reframes The Nature of Order as a computational research program. A harmony-seeking computation repeatedly identifies a latent center L within a larger wholeness W, then creates/reconfigures smaller centers N_i so that L becomes stronger and, crucially, helps the larger W become more coherent (#S53N2R, #S3MN33, #5BC6M2, #GW8NGQ). This distinguishes harmony from ordinary emergence: emergence relates parts to the collective they form, whereas harmony adds a third level—the collective must help the still-larger context (#26RNEY, #NRPMA6). Formally the paper offers postulates and the sequence W_1 -> W_2 -> W_3 through SP-transformations, but openly admits that the mathematical description and operationalization of the fifteen transformations remain incomplete (#9Q3BRS, #5F4JYM, #7FFBLT). For procedural generation, its strongest contribution is therefore not an implementable algorithm but a design criterion/update logic: choose each next move by how it strengthens latent structure across scales, rather than merely applying context-free local production rules. The manuscript’s weakness is that identification of centers, measurement of coherence, and empirical objectivity are asserted more than demonstrated; examples function mainly as analogies and existence arguments. 2. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 10 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #7HNVWB 5. Further discussions on the mathematical model of wholeness Matching excerpt #67CRBZ: The 15 properties are mainly considered as structural properties or the glue that holds space together, through which wholeness can be constructed. Recognition of the underlying structure is just one part of science - discovery. The other part is how to generate the kind of structure, or creation of the living structure, which is the central theme of the second book (Alexander 2002-2005). The 15 properties also can act as the glue for the creation, or the wholeness-extending transformations. For example, the process of generating the snowflake (Figure 1) is not additive but transformative. At each step, we do not just add smaller triangles, but transform the previous version as a whole, to give it more centeredness or wholeness by inducing more triangles (or centers in general) to intensify those that exist already. This generative process of the snowflake is the same as that of creating the life of the column in the step-by-step fashion elaborated by Alexander (2002-2005). In this regard, the mathematical model of wholeness is of use to guide the unfolding process because both the PR scores and ht-index provide good indicators for the degrees of life. 3. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 0 Context: #ASGYJG Preface Matching excerpt #PRJ2E8: There is a structure, visible in any given part of the world, which we may call the wholeness . The wholeness is an abstract mathematical structure, existing in space. It captures what we may loosely consider as the global character of a given configuration, in itself and in relation to the world around it. The wholeness is a structure which exists at many levels of scale, and covers the interrelationships of the configurations at different scales. The primary entities of which the structure is built are centers, centers which become activated in the space as a result of the configuration as a whole. Centers have different levels of strength or coherence. The coherence of a configuration is caused by relationships among other centers. In particular, there are fifteen types of relationships among centers which increase or intensify the strength of any given center. These fifteen properties are listed below, and define the way that configurations within a configuration help each other. Within this scheme, unfolding of new configurations is a natural process, and can be understood and followed. We thus have a basis for making computations about unfolding. These are somewhat similar to the bifurcations that have been observed and analyzed in complex non-linear systems, but they are much richer and more complex than the theory of bifurcations can at present contemplate. Unfolding occurs as a result of structure-preserving (SP-) transformations. These SP-transformations are combinations and sequences of 15 possible spatial transformations based on the fifteen properties that determine how coherent centers may be built from one another. An advanced computational theory of these SP transformations does not yet exist, but it is my aim, in this paper, to show you how unfolding is built from these transformations, and how the outline of a new (computable) theory of unfolding can be established. 4. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 1 Context: #ASGYJG Preface Matching excerpt #USGVK9: Please note that in this context the term “structure-preserving” relates to preserving the structure of wholeness . The term structure-preserving is sometimes used in mathematics to refer to transformations which preserve some particular structural aspect of a given system, but this particular aspect may be arbitrarily chosen. In my use of the term, it means that the given transformation preserves the whole , and is not arbitrary, but dependent on the observer’s ability to see the whole. 5. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 32 Context: #QUCRWC VI STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS: HELPING A LARGER WHOLE TO FORM #FSRDPE The SP-Postulate: Always Helping A Larger Whole To Form #T3NUBP The SP-Transformations Of St Mark's Square, Previously Discussed. Matching excerpt #MKUQJP: Please look back at pages 24-26. Here, in each cycle, the next building to be built is occurring in \mathcal{L} , and the larger context of the whole St. Mark's area is \mathcal{W} . However, there is now a subtlety. In a particular step, we know what \mathcal{L} is, because we are looking back in time and see what the step was. But the people who actually did the step were not, at the time, so clear. They could not know what \mathcal{L} was to be, until examination of the context and the larger whole revealed it to them. And there is a further subtlety. The context \mathcal{W} is not something so vague and general as the whole St. Mark's area. It is, rather, a particular area within St. Mark's square, where a latent center has been identified as being in need of improvement, or presenting itself for elaboration and strengthening. This latent center, which plays a crucial role in the structure-preserving transformations, we are calling \mathcal{L} , and the detailed effects are created (as discussed in my text) by the fifteen transformations acting together. So it is actually the immediate local context of \mathcal{L} that then gives rise to the step that transforms \mathcal{L} . 6. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 17 Context: #EAB6Y7 V EXAMPLES OF HARMONY-SEEKING COMPUTATIONS FROM DIFFERENT FIELDS #LHMQBN Example 7. Evolution of the whorled cap of Acetabularia – 6 steps Matching excerpt #NSEQUK: There is an interesting sequel to this story. When Brian first showed me the diagrammatic sequence illustrated above, I asked him if the progression from round-ended neck to flat-topped neck was correct. Why do you ask? he said. I told him that, looking at this purely from the point of view of structure-preserving transformations, I would have expected something different. It seemed to me very unlikely that a round topped structure could transform into a flat-topped structure. There is nothing like the flat top latent in the configuration. 7. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 59 Context: #A6ZZPA XI CONCLUSIONS #KV48FT What Is The Underlying Process Involved In These Harmony-Seeking Computations Matching excerpt #F2FTQP: I must emphasize that the phenomena I am talking about cannot successfully be grouped under what is loosely called ‘emergence.’ The emergence of wholes does not come about by autonomous processes which happen to aggregate themselves to form wholes. Rather they are processes which contain specific whole-seeking processes: these are the structure-preserving transformations I have described. 8. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 59 Context: #A6ZZPA XI CONCLUSIONS #MRNGTP Structure-Preserving Transformations Matching excerpt #5F4JYM: The mathematical description of an SP-transformation is not yet fully known. However, there is abundant evidence to show that the concept of being SP, of being structure-preserving, is well-defined and objective, in the sense that different observers largely agree among different possible transformations of a given whole, which ones are more SP and which are less so. Approximate matches 1. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 60 Context: #A6ZZPA XI CONCLUSIONS #MRNGTP Structure-Preserving Transformations #HWWGSL Models Of The Wholeness In A Given Configuration? Score: 0.03 Related excerpt #XZ4XQ3: Postulate B1. A transformation is considered to be structure-preserving or SP, if it elaborates existing centers or latent centers in the present configuration, and does not introduce new centers that violate or ‘cut across’ existing centers. 2. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 32 Context: #QUCRWC VI STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS: HELPING A LARGER WHOLE TO FORM #FSRDPE The SP-Postulate: Always Helping A Larger Whole To Form Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #FK2BBR: To undertake this transformation, in such a way that it is indeed a structure-preserving transformation, the various \mathcal{N}_i are to be generated by fifteen generic types of transformation acting on \mathcal{L} . These are the fifteen principal center-creating and structure-preserving transformations listed on pages 2-4: 3. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 33 Context: #QUCRWC VI STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS: HELPING A LARGER WHOLE TO FORM #FSRDPE The SP-Postulate: Always Helping A Larger Whole To Form #T3NUBP The SP-Transformations Of St Mark's Square, Previously Discussed. Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #6RMFUJ: Alternatively we might say that it is each latent center \mathcal{L} , once identified, that is the entity to be transformed, and the transformation is to be done in such a way as to strengthen \mathcal{L} in its ability to help and make cohesive the larger context \mathcal{W} . The particular bits of building needed to carry out the transformation are the various buildings and partial buildings \mathcal{N}_i that are generated by the action of the transformations. 4. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 32 Context: #QUCRWC VI STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS: HELPING A LARGER WHOLE TO FORM #FSRDPE The SP-Postulate: Always Helping A Larger Whole To Form Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #5BC6M2: At the same time, there is a larger whole, often an order of magnitude bigger than \mathcal{L} . The transformation which is structure-preserving, preserves the structure of the \mathcal{W} , and to do so modifies the \mathcal{L} , and modifies it in relation to the whole context around it. Thus the output from this step is a modification geometrically within \mathcal{L} , but it is a function of both \mathcal{L} and \mathcal{W} . In addition, there is a sense in which \mathcal{L} is being fitted to \mathcal{W} , it is being made to fit \mathcal{W} , to be congruent with \mathcal{W} , adapted to \mathcal{W} , harmonious with \mathcal{W} . Further, in order to modify \mathcal{L} in this way, new centers are going to be created within and around \mathcal{L} . We may refer to these new centers as \mathcal{N}_i , and since there may be several of them, we may think of them as \mathcal{N}_1, \mathcal{N}_2, \mathcal{N}_3 , etc. 5. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 59 Context: #A6ZZPA XI CONCLUSIONS #MRNGTP Structure-Preserving Transformations Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #MACZGC: In all these real-world examples, there is a common phenomenon. We may describe it by saying that the steps of the computation are SP (structure-preserving)-transformations which follow this scheme. Each SP-transformation operates on one wholeness, to produce another wholeness. It does it in such a way as to preserve or embellish or enhance the global structure of the first wholeness. 6. Source: Harmony-Seeking Computations: A Science of Non-Classical Dynamics Based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole (#PXG56P), Christopher Alexander, p. 32 Context: #QUCRWC VI STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS: HELPING A LARGER WHOLE TO FORM #FSRDPE The SP-Postulate: Always Helping A Larger Whole To Form Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #S3MN33: In each case there is a whole, \mathcal{W} , and within the whole a latent center which is being modified, transformed, shaped, or reshaped, by a certain step. This latent center is the focus of the transformation, and the latent center sets the boundary of the geometrical and physical transformations that are then actively being undertaken. Let's call this focal latent center \mathcal{L} . 7. Source: Structure-Preserving Transformations (#ZU8GZV), Christopher Alexander, p. 1 Context: #V539MV 2 / STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS FURTHER DISCUSSION Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #R5JFXK: structure-preserving. The two in the second row are not structure-preserving. The transformations in the first row, even though they bring in new structure and open up new directions, preserve and enhance the wholeness of the square with the dot. The transformations in the second row also bring in new structure, but they do it in a way which violates the structure of the square with the dot. Its structure is weakened or destroyed. 8. Source: Structure-Preserving Transformations (#ZU8GZV), Christopher Alexander, p. 1 Context: #V539MV 2 / STRUCTURE-PRESERVING TRANSFORMATIONS FURTHER DISCUSSION Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #3JYNWH: It is the structure-preserving transformations which give us the key to the creation of wholeness. Look at the situation (below) where two very similar trees are standing close together (first diagram). If I string a hammock between them, this is a structure-preserving transformation. The wholeness of the two trees with the hammock is similar to the wholeness of the two trees without the hammock (second diagram). Another structure-preserving transformation occurs if I put a single bench around one of the trees (third diagram). However, this transformation is slightly less structure-preserving, since it introduces an asymmetry that was not there before, and changes the larger wholeness substantially. ### 47. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 6 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #D8FSSB VI. CONCLUSION Matching excerpt #HR3GHQ: In this paper, we distinguished quality-diversity (QD) as a search strategy for search-based procedural content generation. Based on a range of recent applications of QD to games, QD algorithms can produce a large set of diverse (through controllable and often designer-friendly dimensions) and high-quality content (through constraints on playability and/or local competition). This makes PCG-QD particularly efficient in producing many diverse artifacts in one run, which is useful as explainable designer feedback, in a mixed-initiative tool or for expressivity analysis. Based on the current work in this vein, we identified under-explored areas in terms of algorithms and intended uses. Finally, we laid out a vision for the future of the field and the challenges that it will have to overcome. 2. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 5 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #W6TBRK IV. CASES OF QUALITY DIVERSITY IN PCG #L5PLT7 I. Generation of Dungeons Matching excerpt #3CV43W: An interactive variant of constrained MAP-Elites (CME) is proposed in [39] to blend quality-diversity with the mixed-initiative system Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD). EDD is a design tool capable of generating dungeons for adventure games. In this work, CME is augmented with mixed-initiative capabilities and tested in EDD with different pairs of dimension of interest: symmetry and similarity, number of meso-patterns, number of spatial patterns, and linearity. As in the original CME implementation, the infeasible population minimizes the feasibility constraint (playability) while the feasible population maximizes a weighted sum of inventorial aspects of the room and the spatial distribution of design patterns. The user can choose two dimensions of interest and influence the evolutionary process by selecting the favorite solution displayed in the MAP-Elites grid. 3. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 3 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #87RTVY III. WHY QUALITY DIVERSITY? #NM8V4Y D. Human-Machine Co-Creation Matching excerpt #YU83S3: Game development often involves design iterations that can completely change the objectives and design priorities. When game developers work alongside an AI-assisted tool [31], [15], the tool’s ability to illuminate the space with multiple different and good solutions can help designers identify new designs or to perfect generated content based on their current priorities. QD approaches are able to efficiently (see Section III-A) produce a diverse set of high-quality content, and give a designer control to adjust both the criteria of quality and the behavioral characterization of the artifacts. This makes QD approaches especially effective tools for mixed-initiative content design, and can foster their users’ creativity with expected or unexpected but always high-quality suggestions [32]. 4. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 4 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #W6TBRK IV. CASES OF QUALITY DIVERSITY IN PCG #A2EGWD E. Generation of Map Sketches Matching excerpt #H86Q5F: Sentient Sketchbook [15] is a mixed-initiative game design tool where the user can design the level of the game and receive in real-time feedback on playability constraints, balance, etc. PCG-QD has the role of inspiring the user with level suggestions through genetic search. In particular, constrained novelty search [14] is used to produce suggestions using the designer's sketch as an initial seed: a combination of FI-2Pop and novelty search guarantees feasible and highly diverse suggestions. Feasibility tests whether the level is playable (e.g. all resources tiles are reachable by every player's base), while diversity is computed as the number of tiles which are different. Figure 4 shows a screenshot of a design session. 5. Source: Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry (#NRBMD5), Frederic Fol Leymarie, Gorm Lai, William Latham, p. 0 Context: #TESG3N Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry #UGSLF5 ABSTRACT Matching excerpt #QT226Z: While the games industry is moving towards procedural content generation (PCG) with tools available under popular platforms such as Unreal, Unity or Houdini, and video game titles like No Man's Sky and Horizon Zero Dawn taking advantage of PCG, the gap between academia and industry is as wide as it has ever been, in terms of communication and sharing methods. One of the authors, has worked on both sides of this gap and in an effort to shorten it and increase the synergy between the two sectors, has identified three design pillars for PCG using mixed-initiative interfaces. The three pillars are Respect Designer Control , Respect the Creative Process and Respect Existing Work Processes . Respecting designer control is about creating a tool that gives enough control to bring out the designer's vision. Respecting the creative process concerns itself with having a feedback loop that is short enough, that the creative process is not disturbed. Respecting existing work processes means that a PCG tool should plug in easily to existing asset pipelines. As academics and communicators, it is surprising that publications often do not describe ways for developers to use our work or lack considerations for how a piece of work might fit into existing content pipelines. 6. Source: Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry (#NRBMD5), Frederic Fol Leymarie, Gorm Lai, William Latham, p. 0 Context: #TESG3N Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry #EB8KVU 1 INTRODUCTION Matching excerpt #FRG4R6: Respect designer control focuses on empowering the designer to be able to get their vision out. It asks the question, "does the algorithm provide enough control for the designer to express their vision?" Respect the creative process concerns itself with providing a short iterative loop that provides enough feedback to the user that it does not break their creative process. The last pillar, respect existing work processes focuses on the ease of embedding PCG tools into an organisation with an existing workflow that already combines a number of other tools. It is important to figure out exactly where a new tool fits into the workflow, who provides data for it, where the generated content goes next, and what and who is affected when the content is iterated upon. After introducing the pillars by referencing existing literature, we argue in case studies in sections 4.1 and 4.2 that these pillars are in fact useful to industry. 7. Source: Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry (#NRBMD5), Frederic Fol Leymarie, Gorm Lai, William Latham, p. 1 Context: #TESG3N Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry #EC9PWK 3 THE THREE PILLARS #SZM72X 3.2 Respect the Creative Process Matching excerpt #B68RYS: When making changes to procedurally generated content, the iteration must be so fast, that it can compete with the instant feedback of manual labour [5, 30]. The creative process is a feedback loop of trying something out, seeing the result, making changes, seeing the new result, making further changes, and so forth until the designer is satisfied. To stay focused on the task, it is important that this feedback loop is as short as possible. As shown in figure 1 Compton [6] distills the feedback loop into four steps: build a hypothesis, modify the model, evaluate the result and update the model . Compton defines these four steps as the “grokloop”, and considers it as being a way for the user to interact with a generative tool and examining its possibility space. She says “I found myself wanting a way to say the speed of learning depends on how short the loop is ”. While Compton’s work is directed towards casual creators, her arguments are just as valid for game developers. Respecting the creative process echoes Compton’s call to make a grokloop that is as short as possible. 8. Source: Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry (#NRBMD5), Frederic Fol Leymarie, Gorm Lai, William Latham, p. 0 Context: #TESG3N Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry #EB8KVU 1 INTRODUCTION Matching excerpt #CV52ZD: The main contributions of this work are to distill such issues into three design pillars for creating tools for mixed-initiative procedural content generation (MI-PCG): Respect Designer Control , Respect the Creative Process and Respect Existing Workflow . Approximate matches 1. Source: Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation (#4TH488), Antonios Liapis, G. Michael Youngblood, Jichen Zhu, Rafael Bidarra, Sebastian Risi, p. 5 Context: #TS8HQQ Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation #L7TGN5 VI. THREE USE CASES #KG32FP B. Use Case 2: Black-box PCG System Score: 0.022 Related excerpt #LLDEFE: Imagine a black-box AI assistant using a DNN to recognize ideal topology for road placement, which is then placed by a set of construction rules biased by a provided set of city road layout examples filtered by design language labels. In order to build common ground , the AI assistant will need to interactively show the designer how the provided land and topology are perceived and how its prior examples are used to generate roads based on the language provided, as well as how these concepts may roll-up hierarchically in the system. This may involve keeping connections to the training data used in the deliberative creation process of reactive techniques in the system. Thus, the system reveals enough information to allow the induction of a model of the AI in the designer. When a mapping of the designer’s internal model is connected to a correct induction of the AI assistant’s internal model, common ground is established by sharing a language, an understanding, and the ability to update both sides easily. The key challenge is how and what to share to build that model in the designer’s mind without exposing them to the potentially massive amounts of data used to train the network and used by the system for making decisions. Induced models in humans can be tested by predictive capability and accuracy. 2. Source: Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation (#4TH488), Antonios Liapis, G. Michael Youngblood, Jichen Zhu, Rafael Bidarra, Sebastian Risi, p. 5 Context: #TS8HQQ Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation #L7TGN5 VI. THREE USE CASES #KG32FP B. Use Case 2: Black-box PCG System Score: 0.021 Related excerpt #LUFV57: A designer first working with an AI assistant could spend a great amount of time probing the system with variations and developing a mapping (or model) of how changes in input impact output (learning by observation). However, that is quite tedious and a more abstract, explained transformation process would be faster to comprehend and work with for a designer. A human may direct an AI assistant to build a city in the ‘American style’; knowing that this means a city laid out in generously-sized square blocks with most streets having simple intersections is an easy and powerful way to produce a desired design. Ultimately, this is a direction for an agreed concept in the transformation process of the technique. There are a lot of details needed to produce that design, which are encapsulated in a specific design concept. Mechanisms that build and update that common ground language and mapped meaning need to be added to the techniques inside the black-box. For reactive techniques, the artifacts of training data and the process of machine learning may need to be included in some form to facilitate explanation of the internal mechanisms. 3. Source: Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation (#4TH488), Antonios Liapis, G. Michael Youngblood, Jichen Zhu, Rafael Bidarra, Sebastian Risi, p. 5 Context: #TS8HQQ Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation #L7TGN5 VI. THREE USE CASES #KG32FP B. Use Case 2: Black-box PCG System Score: 0.02 Related excerpt #TTWT9N: On the XAID spectra, black-box PCG AI assistants for designers require the most explainability as they involve learning, recognizing, and extending patterns to create content the subtleties of which a designer will want to understand and work on together with the AI. On initiative, these systems are likely to be on-task colleagues or have high-functioning autonomy. On domain overlap, as the example given in Section V-C, creating content with an AI will have high overlap, but on-demand and often turn-based . The PCG AI assistant and the designer work closely together, refining until the desired content is produced. The designer provides the vision, the AI provides capabilities, and they merge that into the creation. 4. Source: Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation (#4TH488), Antonios Liapis, G. Michael Youngblood, Jichen Zhu, Rafael Bidarra, Sebastian Risi, p. 3 Context: #TS8HQQ Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation #KYV5WL IV. EXPLAINABLE AI FOR DESIGNERS (XAID) Score: 0.016 Related excerpt #VR4VMX: We propose a new area of research in eXplainable AI for Designers (XAID) who create interactive digital products built on AI components. As AI and ML techniques are mature enough to reach commercial products (e.g. computer games, virtual assistants, smart objects), designers need to understand how the AI component works in order to devise desirable ways for the end-users to interact with the systems. Unlike the end-users of an AI system, designers constitute a unique user group because they not only consume the results of AI systems, but also co-create with them. To the best of our knowledge, no XAI work focuses on designers and co-creation. 5. Source: Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation (#4TH488), Antonios Liapis, G. Michael Youngblood, Jichen Zhu, Rafael Bidarra, Sebastian Risi, p. 6 Context: #TS8HQQ Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation #MGUBR3 VIII. CONCLUSIONS Score: 0.015 Related excerpt #4ZBDHJ: In conclusion, we proposed the new research area of eXplainable AI for designers (XAID), to help game designers better utilize AI and ML in their design tasks through co-creation. Our position is that, in order to make usable and efficient XAID systems, we need to build on understandings of both algorithmic properties of the underlying AI techniques and the needs of human designers. We mapped the space of XAID with three axes—the spectra of explainability, initiative, and domain overlap—and illustrated our approach through three specific use cases. Based on a deeper analysis into use cases, we identified key open challenges. 6. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 3 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #87RTVY III. WHY QUALITY DIVERSITY? #RP6TAN E. Explainability Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #VBGH4T: in another design iteration. Since QD approaches such as MAP-Elites illuminate the search space and visualize it as a feature map, this can help developers explore and understand the generator’s output [34]. Explainability in this vein is tied to the online and embedded expressivity analysis of these algorithms (see Section III-C). As with any evolutionary algorithm in the SBPCG family, QD approaches can explain the origins of the artifact by showing the lineage of any individual (e.g., in [35], [36]). Strengthening this latter form of explanation, the fact that PCG-QD is efficient in producing a set of good and diverse artifacts in one run (see Section III-A) strengthens this lineage visualization as the common ancestors of different sets of high-performing content can be shown. These different visualizations can help the designer group individuals and select those with the desired features among the many individuals generated by the algorithm. 7. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 3 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #87RTVY III. WHY QUALITY DIVERSITY? #RP6TAN E. Explainability Score: 0.022 Related excerpt #SCKH27: Explainable AI for Designers [33] is an important research area that aims to aid the game designer in understanding AI algorithms applied to games. Such explainability is useful during co-creative tasks (see Section III-D) but also for debugging purposes or when the generated artifact is used 8. Source: Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity (#7GR3AQ), Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Daniele Gravina, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius, p. 3 Context: #DZ9GFC Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity #87RTVY III. WHY QUALITY DIVERSITY? #NM8V4Y D. Human-Machine Co-Creation Score: 0.018 Related excerpt #YU83S3: Game development often involves design iterations that can completely change the objectives and design priorities. When game developers work alongside an AI-assisted tool [31], [15], the tool’s ability to illuminate the space with multiple different and good solutions can help designers identify new designs or to perfect generated content based on their current priorities. QD approaches are able to efficiently (see Section III-A) produce a diverse set of high-quality content, and give a designer control to adjust both the criteria of quality and the behavioral characterization of the artifacts. This makes QD approaches especially effective tools for mixed-initiative content design, and can foster their users’ creativity with expected or unexpected but always high-quality suggestions [32]. ### 48. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Procedural Riverscapes (#AK7NGE), A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial, p. 9 Context: #JJE8HN Procedural Riverscapes #NHDQDL 7. Implementation and results #KNTPE7 7.3. Comparison to Other Techniques Matching excerpt #GUWHYX: In terms of other comparisons, Yu et al. [YNBH09] define their procedural water dynamics as a smooth function based on distance to the nearest river bank. In contrast, our primitives are not restricted in placement or parametrization and this affords greater realism and control. In particular, the variety of achievable phenomena in our method compares favorably to the feature-based vector simulation of water-waves described in Yue et al. [YNS11]. Genevieux et al. [GGG + 13] present a large-scale hydrology-based terrain generation process. While this could be fed into our pipeline, thereby bypassing river network generation, 2. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 0 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #SFQZPA 1 Introduction Matching excerpt #CL3N2Q: We propose a novel procedural approach, using river networks, for terrain modeling. The user optionally defines the river mouths and sketches the most important rivers on the terrain, and our approach generates the complete river network with the corresponding terrain, as shown in Fig. 1. The user can also control the river network and terrain generation with a set of intuitive parameters. Our method can represent large terrain models with complex river networks and geomorphologically consistent patterns that conform with observations from landscape and river science and yet provide a high level of controllability. The actual river geometry is generated by converting the drainage network data into a subset of river types that are taken from a well-known classification in hydrology [Rosen 1994]. The terrain is stored in a novel hierarchical continuous data representation that is inspired by constructive solid geometry (CSG). The terrain features are stored in the tree leaves, and the internal nodes define operations (blending, subtraction) on them. Contrary to most of the previous work, our terrain is represented by an analytic continuous function and not as a raster-based height field. Yet, our terrain is composed of many primitives and not a single abstract function. This allows us to generate large-scale terrains with an unlimited and locally varying level of detail. 3. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 1 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #CZMG8P 2 Related Work Matching excerpt #QKZVHE: Various techniques exist that attempt to incorporate rivers into the procedural terrain generation. Probably the first one is the paper by Kelley et al. [1988], who proposed a procedural method to generate watersheds. Their approach resembles ours because the river network is generated first and the terrain second. However, our algorithm creates large terrains represented by a continuous procedural model from a hydrographically and geomorphologically consistent river drainage network. It can also be used to generate terrains from partial input sketches. Prusinkiewicz et al. [1993] combined context-sensitive L-systems with the midpoint displacement method in an approach that imprints the rivers into fractal terrains. Later Belhadj and Audibert [2005] presented a modified stochastic subdivision algorithm that constrains ridges and river curves generated by fractional Brownian motion. Teoh [2009] presented an algorithm for terrain generation that also starts by producing the river network. However, our approach is based on models from hydrology, provides better control over the terrain generation process, and generates implicit terrain decomposition into continuous patches. Similarly, Derzapf et al. [2011] generated river networks on a planetary scale. 4. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 8 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #2TLVR2 9 Conclusion Matching excerpt #JGG7QW: We introduced a novel hydrology-based method for procedural terrain generation that allows a high level of control of the generation process. The terrain generation is derived from the underlying hydrographic network, and it guarantees that the construction satisfies hydrographic properties. The final geometric model is made of vector-based primitives and is able to describe hills, mountains, valleys, and water-courses with highly detailed geometry on varying scales. The key motivation for our work comes from the Rosgen classification in hydrology that allows us to produce important visual features of rivers, such as paths and profiles. There are many possible extensions of this work. As with every procedural system, the rules and the labeling algorithm require a certain level of experimentation to find a set of well-behaving values. However, the values presented in this paper led to visually plausible terrains 5. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 0 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #F9QBNZ Abstract Matching excerpt #7CSK9U: We present a framework that allows quick and intuitive modeling of terrains using concepts inspired by hydrology. The terrain is generated from a simple initial sketch, and its generation is controlled by a few parameters. Our terrain representation is both analytic and continuous and can be rendered by using varying levels of detail. The terrain data are stored in a novel data structure: a construction tree whose internal nodes define a combination of operations, and whose leaves represent terrain features. The framework uses rivers as modeling elements, and it first creates a hierarchical drainage network that is represented as a geometric graph over a given input domain. The network is then analyzed to construct watersheds and to characterize the different types and trajectories of rivers. The terrain is finally generated by combining procedural terrain and river patches with blending and carving operators. 6. Source: Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation (#DWXKYQ), Boris Gailleton, Guillaume Cordonnier, Petros Tzathas, Philippe Steer, p. 12 Context: #JDHNVB Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation #US5Z9M 8. Conclusion Matching excerpt #CEANXB: We proposed a new method to quickly erode large-scale terrains. Thanks to the analytical solution of the stream power law, we do not have to rely anymore on numerous iterations inherent in simulations. Instead, the time becomes another parameter that the user can explore without any incidence on the computation time. We proposed a derivation and implementation of these analytical solutions adapted to computer graphics applications, allowing the user to specify both an initial terrain to be eroded and an uplift map to control the emergence of a mountain range and explore any intermediate possibility. To the challenge of generating a terrain physically consistent with its river network, we propose two solutions that yield interactive performances: an accurate multigrid acceleration, and an optimization-based approach that preserves the initial river network. Eventually, we introduced new models for hillslope and thermal erosion that are easily integrable in our implementation. Our main limitation is the lack of time consistency at large time t , which motivates future work on a more conservative hydrology-based multigrid scheme, or alternative solutions where analytical solutions would control the procedural generation of river networks [GBG + 19]. 7. Source: Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation (#DWXKYQ), Boris Gailleton, Guillaume Cordonnier, Petros Tzathas, Philippe Steer, p. 1 Context: #JDHNVB Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation #TY8V58 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #MYMRA9: The stream power law is commonly used in geomorphology [WT99, BW13] and now in computer graphics [CBC*16, SPF*23] to model large-scale river erosion. Combined with uplift - the tectonically-driven rate of elevation change of the mountain - this results in a Partial Differential Equation (PDE) that describes the formation of the mountain ranges over geological time. Early studies in Earth sciences suggest that this equation admits analytical solutions [RTP13, Ste21] that readily provide a landscape at a time t (Figure 1), without requiring the lengthy iterations of a time-stepping scheme. However, these solutions use several simplifying assumptions, for instance, that the terrain is initially flat. We propose a new derivation and fast numerical implementation of these solutions for the more general case, which enables us to reach a larger range of applications, from the instantaneous generation of large-scale mountain ranges to the controllable aging of a user-provided terrain. Inspired by the implicit time-stepping scheme for the stream power law [BW13, CBC*16], our algorithm uses an ordering of the terrain grid cells, starting at the domain boundaries, and following the river network upstream. This strategy comes with a caveat illustrative of the challenges of porting the 1D solution to the 2D setting: elevations are computed based on an order that depends on the hydrology network, but the hydrology network itself depends on the elevations. Previous work [Ste21] developed a fixed-point algorithm that iterates over the successive computation of the river network and then the elevations. Yet, this algorithm converges slowly, requiring too many iterations to be applied in an interactive editing context and assumes flat initial topography. We therefore propose two solutions: one inspired by multigrid approaches to accelerate the convergence, and another that allows small deviations from the analytical solutions and uses optimization to enforce the smoothness of the terrain surface. This added freedom - without sacrificing the geological consistency - provides more flexibility and allows user control. Finally, we observe that the solutions to the stream power law yield a singularity that results in infinitely large slopes close to the ridges - where geologists suggest that other erosion processes dominate [LD03]. Therefore, we explore solutions to include approximations of other processes such as hillslope and thermal erosion. We demonstrate the applicability of our method through a variety of results, that show the versatility of the analytical solutions that are able to quickly generate large-scale mountains (Figure 1, right), as well as providing a fast physically-based erosion tool (Figure 1, center left). 8. Source: Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation (#DWXKYQ), Boris Gailleton, Guillaume Cordonnier, Petros Tzathas, Philippe Steer, p. 1 Context: #JDHNVB Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation #2BWKC4 2. Previous Work Matching excerpt #44R764: Procedural generation [EMP*02] builds terrains from a combination of mathematical functions, especially multi-frequency noise that mimics the self-similarity of nature across scales [MVN68]. This mathematical foundation leads to methods that are extremely fast, parallel, and unbounded in size. These approaches are usually hard to control, although this issue has been recently alleviated, either by local editing tools such as noise brushes [dCB09], global interpolation around diffusion curves [HGA*10], or in the gradient domain [GPM*22]. It is, however, still difficult to ensure the realism and consistency of the results. One solution is to build the terrain around a procedural river network [GGG*13] which ensures hydrological consistency. Thanks to our analytical solution of the physical equations, our model ensures consistency of the hydrology network and the topography, and introduces a temporal parameter. Approximate matches 1. Source: Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion (#96ZMGK), Adrien Peytavie, Bedrich Benes, Guillaume Cordonnier, Jean Braun, Marie-Paule Cani, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 1 Context: #A48PSA Large Scale Terrain Generation from Tectonic Uplift and Fluvial Erosion #X3SQUZ 2. Related Work Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #M5R8G5: To improve the user control of fractal-based methods, several algorithms were used that attempted to model terrain generation from a set of 3D feature curves used to specify ridges and river networks [KMN88, HGA + 10] or from a user-defined hydrology map [GGG + 13]. Although these methods generate plausible river 2. Source: Procedural Riverscapes (#AK7NGE), A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial, p. 0 Context: #JJE8HN Procedural Riverscapes #RMH5XA 1. Introduction Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #2JBFEL: Specifically, from the starting point of a bare-earth terrain, either sourced from existing digital elevation models, generated procedurally, or modeled by the user, and with a range of permissible sampling resolutions (1m - 30m per pixel), a plausible river network is derived according to the Rosgen classification used in hydrology, inscribed into the terrain, and populated with a consistent animated water surface. The resulting river structure and dynamics can also 3. Source: Procedural Riverscapes (#AK7NGE), A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial, p. 0 Context: #JJE8HN Procedural Riverscapes #RMH5XA 1. Introduction Score: 0.021 Related excerpt #XTM5V7: Our technical contributions include: 1) a procedural pipeline for generating extensive, complex, branching rivers courses on bare-earth terrains, 2) the adapted carving of a riverbed according to the Rosgen classification scheme, 3) a novel blend-flow tree representation, which provides a function-based composite water surface that can be animated in real-time, 4) user control over the procedural scene elements, which allows effective authoring of riverscapes. 4. Source: Procedural Riverscapes (#AK7NGE), A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial, p. 10 Context: #JJE8HN Procedural Riverscapes #BR5ZZK 8. Conclusion Score: 0.021 Related excerpt #2BABHT: The core of our system is a workflow that analyses an input terrain to derive its flow properties and uses this information to generate and carve out a river network, before instantiating the water surface with procedural animated riverflow primitives arranged in a blend-flow tree. While user intervention is not required it is supported at multiple stages of the pipeline, from providing a constraining river footprint with the terrain input to fine-tuning the parameters of individual riverflow primitives in the river model output. 5. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 0 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #SFQZPA 1 Introduction Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #CL3N2Q: We propose a novel procedural approach, using river networks, for terrain modeling. The user optionally defines the river mouths and sketches the most important rivers on the terrain, and our approach generates the complete river network with the corresponding terrain, as shown in Fig. 1. The user can also control the river network and terrain generation with a set of intuitive parameters. Our method can represent large terrain models with complex river networks and geomorphologically consistent patterns that conform with observations from landscape and river science and yet provide a high level of controllability. The actual river geometry is generated by converting the drainage network data into a subset of river types that are taken from a well-known classification in hydrology [Rosen 1994]. The terrain is stored in a novel hierarchical continuous data representation that is inspired by constructive solid geometry (CSG). The terrain features are stored in the tree leaves, and the internal nodes define operations (blending, subtraction) on them. Contrary to most of the previous work, our terrain is represented by an analytic continuous function and not as a raster-based height field. Yet, our terrain is composed of many primitives and not a single abstract function. This allows us to generate large-scale terrains with an unlimited and locally varying level of detail. 6. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 8 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #2TLVR2 9 Conclusion Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #JGG7QW: We introduced a novel hydrology-based method for procedural terrain generation that allows a high level of control of the generation process. The terrain generation is derived from the underlying hydrographic network, and it guarantees that the construction satisfies hydrographic properties. The final geometric model is made of vector-based primitives and is able to describe hills, mountains, valleys, and water-courses with highly detailed geometry on varying scales. The key motivation for our work comes from the Rosgen classification in hydrology that allows us to produce important visual features of rivers, such as paths and profiles. There are many possible extensions of this work. As with every procedural system, the rules and the labeling algorithm require a certain level of experimentation to find a set of well-behaving values. However, the values presented in this paper led to visually plausible terrains 7. Source: Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology (#DMTA8Y), Adrien Peytavie, Bedřich Beneš, Jean-David Génevaux, Éric Galin, Éric Guérin, p. 0 Context: #RULAFW Terrain Generation Using Procedural Models Based on Hydrology #F9QBNZ Abstract Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #7CSK9U: We present a framework that allows quick and intuitive modeling of terrains using concepts inspired by hydrology. The terrain is generated from a simple initial sketch, and its generation is controlled by a few parameters. Our terrain representation is both analytic and continuous and can be rendered by using varying levels of detail. The terrain data are stored in a novel data structure: a construction tree whose internal nodes define a combination of operations, and whose leaves represent terrain features. The framework uses rivers as modeling elements, and it first creates a hierarchical drainage network that is represented as a geometric graph over a given input domain. The network is then analyzed to construct watersheds and to characterize the different types and trajectories of rivers. The terrain is finally generated by combining procedural terrain and river patches with blending and carving operators. 8. Source: Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation (#DWXKYQ), Boris Gailleton, Guillaume Cordonnier, Petros Tzathas, Philippe Steer, p. 1 Context: #JDHNVB Physically-based analytical erosion for fast terrain generation #2BWKC4 2. Previous Work Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #44R764: Procedural generation [EMP*02] builds terrains from a combination of mathematical functions, especially multi-frequency noise that mimics the self-similarity of nature across scales [MVN68]. This mathematical foundation leads to methods that are extremely fast, parallel, and unbounded in size. These approaches are usually hard to control, although this issue has been recently alleviated, either by local editing tools such as noise brushes [dCB09], global interpolation around diffusion curves [HGA*10], or in the gradient domain [GPM*22]. It is, however, still difficult to ensure the realism and consistency of the results. One solution is to build the terrain around a procedural river network [GGG*13] which ensures hydrological consistency. Thanks to our analytical solution of the physical equations, our model ensures consistency of the hydrology network and the topography, and introduces a temporal parameter. ### 49. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 1 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #BQLCAB 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #X3GMY7: A living structure has numerous substructures or subsymmetries with an inherent hierarchy that retains two distinct properties: far more smalls than larges across the hierarchical levels or scales, while more or less similar on each level or scale of the hierarchy. For example, a tree as a living structure has far more small branches than large ones, while the branches on each scale (or each level of its hierarchy) are more or less similar sized. The concept of living structure means structurally living, not necessary to be biologically alive, so a dead tree can be a living structure as long as these two properties remain. These two properties—far more smalls than larges across the hierarchy, and more or less similar on each level of the hierarchy—constitute respectively two fundamental laws of living structure: scaling law (Jiang 2015a) and Tobler’s law (1970). Beauty is therefore—first and foremost—about the physical and mathematical structure that pervasively exists in things or their images (see Section 2 for more detail) and then the structure can be well reflected in the human heart and mind to have a sense of beauty. In other words, it is largely the underlying living structure that triggers the perception or cognition of beauty in the human mind and deep psyche. This paper is an attempt to develop a computational approach for assessing the goodness or beauty of an image based on the living structure. 2. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 12 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #PQFTNG 6. Conclusion Matching excerpt #MHC3DH: Structural beauty, as defined and computed in this paper, presents a radical mindset change from subjective to objective beauty, thus significantly contributing to the effort on aesthetic measures and image understanding. We develop a computational approach to structural beauty or goodness of an image based on the living structure, a new way of image understanding. An image is commonly represented mechanically by many individual pixels, but human perception of the image is hardly pixel-based and is instead oriented towards a coherent whole (e.g., the figure of the figure of the figure and so on) or living structure. As a natural and organic representation, a living structure derived from an image constitutes the backbone or configuration of the image from a holistic perspective. It is governed by two fundamental laws: scaling law and Tobler’s law, which are respectively available across different levels and at each level of the hierarchy. There are far more small substructures than large ones, according to scaling law, whereas substructures are more or less similar in terms of Tobler’s law. These two laws of living structure underlie the computational approach to the goodness or structural beauty of an image. The living structure of an image is composed of many substructures with the inherent hierarchy of far more smalls than larges. The figure of the image can be further composed of many substructures with the inherent hierarchy of far more smalls than larges. Therefore, structural beauty or life (L), given as S (the number of substructures) times H (the number of hierarchical levels), is computed based on the rule that the more substructures, the more beautiful, and the higher hierarchy, the more beautiful. The measure of structural beauty or the computational approach in general is shown to be simple, effective, and efficient for ranking different images. 3. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 11 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #MHMBEA 5. Implications of the computational approach and future work Matching excerpt #B23RKG: Structural beauty has many synonyms, including living structure, wholeness, life, organized complexity (Jacobs 1961, Salinger 1997), and fractal (Mandelbrot 1983), all of which focus on the structural aspect. This structural aspect has been previously studied in the literature, albeit without explicitly referring to the notion of living structure, simply because it did not yet exist. For example, the hierarchical model that underlies the central place theory (Christaller 1933, 1966), is essentially about the kind of structural beauty over a country among all the settlements at different levels of hierarchy. Not only the settlements as a whole, but also an individual settlement (or city) demonstrates the kind of structural beauty, because there are far more small substructures than large ones in the city. It is the living structure or structural beauty that helps shape the mental image of the city (Lynch 1960). In this regard, the computational approach also provides an effective and efficient measure for computing the image of the city. 4. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 0 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #S85XGC Abstract Matching excerpt #2XX4AM: To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that beauty is largely subjective so varies from person to person. While the subjectivity view is commonly held, there is also an objectivity view that seeks to measure beauty or aesthetics in some quantitative manners. Christopher Alexander has long discovered that beauty or coherence highly correlates to the number of subsymmetries or substructures and demonstrated that there is a shared notion of beauty – structural beauty – among people and even different peoples, regardless of their faiths, cultures, and ethnicities. This notion of structural beauty arises directly out of living structure or wholeness, a physical and mathematical structure that underlies all space and matter. Based on the concept of living structure, this paper develops an approach for computing the structural beauty or life of an image (L) based on the number of automatically derived substructures (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H). To verify this approach, we conducted a series of case studies applied to eight pairs of images including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles. We discovered among others that Blue Poles is more structurally beautiful than the Mona Lisa, and traditional buildings are in general more structurally beautiful than their modernist counterparts. This finding implies that goodness of things or images is largely a matter of fact rather than an opinion or personal preference as conventionally conceived. The research on structural beauty has deep implications on many disciplines, where beauty or aesthetics is a major concern such as image understanding and computer vision, architecture and urban design, humanities and arts, neurophysiology, and psychology. 5. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #9FK8U9 3. Wholeness as a hierarchical graph Matching excerpt #25Z8H8: The idea of wholeness has been discussed in a variety of sciences such as physics, biology, neurophysiology, medicine, cosmology, and ecology (e.g., Bohm 1980), but no one prior to Alexander (2002-2005) has ever formulated and defined it in precise mathematical language. Following Alexander's definition of wholeness, some previous efforts have been made (e.g., Salinas 1997) to quantify the degree of life of architecture. The proposed measure L does indicate approximately the degrees of life, but it lacks of the recursive property. We represent a whole as a graph, in which the nodes and links represent identified centers and their relationships within the whole (Figure 3). With the graph, we can compute the degrees of life for the individual centers and the whole. What is unique for our model is that it captures fairly well the recursive nature of wholeness as defined by Alexander. This section presents the two measures, the PR scores and ht-index, and argues why they can be a good proxy of degrees of life or beauty. In the next section, we further illustrate through case studies that a living structure demonstrates a scaling hierarchy of far more low-degree-of-life centers than high-degree-of-life centers; and the degree of the scaling hierarchy can be characterized by the ht-index: the higher the ht-index, the higher degree of life or wholeness. 6. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 1 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #3KT2GU 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #EHDJCS: This paper develops a mathematical model of wholeness by defining it as a hierarchical graph, in which the nodes and links respectively represent individual centers and their relationships. The graph provides a powerful means for computing the degree of wholeness or life. First, the graph can be easily perceived as a whole of interconnected centers, enabling a recursive definition of wholeness or centers. Second, spaces with a living structure demonstrate a scaling hierarchy of far more low-degree-of-life centers than high-degree-of-life ones. The life or beauty of individual centers can be measured by PageRank (PR) scores (Page and Brin 1998), which are based on a recursive definition that high-degree-of-life centers are those to which many high-degree-of-life centers point. For the graph as a whole, its degree of life can be characterized by the ht-index derived from the PR scores; the higher the ht-index, the higher degree of life in the whole. The ht-index (Jiang and Yin 2014) was initially developed to measure the complexity of fractals or geographic features in particular, and it was actually induced by head/tail breaks as a classification scheme (Jiang 2013a), and a visualization tool (Jiang 2015a). Things of different sizes can be ranked in decreasing order and broken down around the average or mean into two unbalanced parts. Those above the mean, essentially a minority, constitute the head, and those below the mean, a majority, are the tail. This breaking process continues recursively for the head (or the large things) until the notion of far more small things than large ones is violated. 7. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 10 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #TXBKLJ 4. Case studies: Computing the degrees of life #3NPEFU 4.2 The streets of Manhattan and Sweden Matching excerpt #EHYPC4: The three case studies demonstrate that the defined wholeness, or hierarchical graph, captures fairly well human intuitions on the degree of life. Various maps or patterns based on the head/tail breaks classification were found to have a higher degree of life than those using natural breaks through the mirror-of-the-self test (Wu 2015). It was also found that the kind of skills of appreciating the living structure can be improved through training. The reader might have noticed that the hierarchical graph goes beyond the existing geographic representations (Peuquet 2002), since it is topological rather than geometric (Jiang and Claramunt 2004). The topological representation enables us to see the underlying scaling pattern, which constitutes a different way of thinking, the Paretian thinking, for geospatial analysis (Jiang 2015b). The model of wholeness would contribute fundamentally to geodesign by orienting or re-orienting it towards beautiful built and natural environments or with a high degree of wholeness. Geodesign, as currently conceived (e.g., Lee, Dias and Scholten 2014), mainly refers to a set of geospatial techniques and technologies for planning built and natural environments through encouraging wide-range human participation and engagement. However, there is a lack of standards in terms of what a good environment is. The model of wholeness provides a useful tool and indices for measuring the goodness. We therefore believe that geodesign should be considered as the wholeness-extending transformations, or something like the unfolding processes of seeds or embryos (Alexander 2002–2005) towards a high degree of wholeness (see a further discussion in Section 5). This idea of unfolding applies to map design as well, since maps are essentially fractal and possess the same kind of beauty (Jiang 2015c). This is in line with what we have discussed at the beginning of this paper that design should be part of complexity science. The mathematical model of wholeness also points to the fact that the wholeness or degree of life is mathematical and computational (Alexander 2002–2005), and it captures the nature of space, or geographic space in particular. The next section adds some further discussions on the mathematical model of wholeness and its implications in the era of big data. 8. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 0 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #QT5RF7 Abstract Matching excerpt #HDXQZV: According to Christopher Alexander's theory of centers, a whole comprises numerous, recursively defined centers for things or spaces surrounding us. Wholeness is a type of global structure or life-giving order emerging from the whole as a field of the centers. The wholeness is an essential part of any complex system and exists, to some degree or other, in spaces. This paper defines wholeness as a hierarchical graph, in which individual centers are represented as the nodes and their relationships as the directed links. The hierarchical graph gets its name from the inherent scaling hierarchy revealed by the head/tail breaks, which is a classification scheme and visualization tool for data with a heavy-tailed distribution. We suggest that (1) the degrees of wholeness for individual centers should be measured by PageRank (PR) scores based on the notion that high-degree-of-life centers are those to which many high-degree-of-life centers point, and (2) that the hierarchical levels, or the ht-index of the PR scores induced by the head/tail breaks can characterize the degree of wholeness for the whole: the higher the ht-index, the more life or wholeness in the whole. Three case studies applied to the Alhambra building complex and the street networks of Manhattan and Sweden illustrate that the defined wholeness captures fairly well human intuitions on the degree of life for the geographic spaces. We further suggest that the mathematical model of wholeness be an important model of geographic representation, because it is topological oriented that enables us to see the underlying scaling structure. The model can guide geodesign, which should be considered as the wholeness-extending transformations that are essentially like the unfolding processes of seeds or embryos, for creating beautiful built and natural environments or with a high degree of wholeness. Approximate matches 1. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 2 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #NHF3AU 2. Living structure and its governing laws: a human face image as a working example Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #BEUZHN: Any living structure has a certain degree of beauty or livingness, which can be characterized by many substructures and their inherent hierarchy. Thus, a useful rule regarding the degree of beauty is the more substructures, the more beautiful, and the higher the hierarchy of the substructures, the more beautiful 2. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 1 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #BQLCAB 1. Introduction Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #X3GMY7: A living structure has numerous substructures or subsymmetries with an inherent hierarchy that retains two distinct properties: far more smalls than larges across the hierarchical levels or scales, while more or less similar on each level or scale of the hierarchy. For example, a tree as a living structure has far more small branches than large ones, while the branches on each scale (or each level of its hierarchy) are more or less similar sized. The concept of living structure means structurally living, not necessary to be biologically alive, so a dead tree can be a living structure as long as these two properties remain. These two properties—far more smalls than larges across the hierarchy, and more or less similar on each level of the hierarchy—constitute respectively two fundamental laws of living structure: scaling law (Jiang 2015a) and Tobler’s law (1970). Beauty is therefore—first and foremost—about the physical and mathematical structure that pervasively exists in things or their images (see Section 2 for more detail) and then the structure can be well reflected in the human heart and mind to have a sense of beauty. In other words, it is largely the underlying living structure that triggers the perception or cognition of beauty in the human mind and deep psyche. This paper is an attempt to develop a computational approach for assessing the goodness or beauty of an image based on the living structure. 3. Source: Structural Beauty: A Structure-Based Computational Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image (#3XSLTA), Bin Jiang, Chris de Rijke, p. 2 Context: #ELWE7N Structural Beauty: A Structure-based Approach to Quantifying the Beauty of an Image #NHF3AU 2. Living structure and its governing laws: a human face image as a working example Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #F9A2SX: The notion of living structure, seen from the above working example, is supported by two laws: scaling law across the four scales (or hierarchical levels) ranging from the smallest (blue) to the largest (red), and Tobler's law on each scale or level (of the four). These two laws are the fundamental laws of living structure. They are complementary to each other in many aspects, as shown in Table 1. For example, the ratio of smalls to larges is dispositional across scales: (1) large substructures are very large, while the small substructures are very small, and (2) the number of smalls is far greater than the number of larges. Along with the two laws, there are two design principles, namely differentiation and adaptation (Alexander2002–2005, Jiang 2019); the substructures can be said to be differentiated from the whole structure, yet they are well adapted to each other to constitute a cohere whole or living structure. 4. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #9FK8U9 3. Wholeness as a hierarchical graph Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #25Z8H8: The idea of wholeness has been discussed in a variety of sciences such as physics, biology, neurophysiology, medicine, cosmology, and ecology (e.g., Bohm 1980), but no one prior to Alexander (2002-2005) has ever formulated and defined it in precise mathematical language. Following Alexander's definition of wholeness, some previous efforts have been made (e.g., Salinas 1997) to quantify the degree of life of architecture. The proposed measure L does indicate approximately the degrees of life, but it lacks of the recursive property. We represent a whole as a graph, in which the nodes and links represent identified centers and their relationships within the whole (Figure 3). With the graph, we can compute the degrees of life for the individual centers and the whole. What is unique for our model is that it captures fairly well the recursive nature of wholeness as defined by Alexander. This section presents the two measures, the PR scores and ht-index, and argues why they can be a good proxy of degrees of life or beauty. In the next section, we further illustrate through case studies that a living structure demonstrates a scaling hierarchy of far more low-degree-of-life centers than high-degree-of-life centers; and the degree of the scaling hierarchy can be characterized by the ht-index: the higher the ht-index, the higher degree of life or wholeness. 5. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 1 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #3KT2GU 1. Introduction Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #EHDJCS: This paper develops a mathematical model of wholeness by defining it as a hierarchical graph, in which the nodes and links respectively represent individual centers and their relationships. The graph provides a powerful means for computing the degree of wholeness or life. First, the graph can be easily perceived as a whole of interconnected centers, enabling a recursive definition of wholeness or centers. Second, spaces with a living structure demonstrate a scaling hierarchy of far more low-degree-of-life centers than high-degree-of-life ones. The life or beauty of individual centers can be measured by PageRank (PR) scores (Page and Brin 1998), which are based on a recursive definition that high-degree-of-life centers are those to which many high-degree-of-life centers point. For the graph as a whole, its degree of life can be characterized by the ht-index derived from the PR scores; the higher the ht-index, the higher degree of life in the whole. The ht-index (Jiang and Yin 2014) was initially developed to measure the complexity of fractals or geographic features in particular, and it was actually induced by head/tail breaks as a classification scheme (Jiang 2013a), and a visualization tool (Jiang 2015a). Things of different sizes can be ranked in decreasing order and broken down around the average or mean into two unbalanced parts. Those above the mean, essentially a minority, constitute the head, and those below the mean, a majority, are the tail. This breaking process continues recursively for the head (or the large things) until the notion of far more small things than large ones is violated. 6. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 10 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #7HNVWB 5. Further discussions on the mathematical model of wholeness Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #76TYGV: The mathematical model of wholeness is not limited to measuring the degree of life in geographic space. It can be applied to artifacts such as Baroque and Beaux arts, kaleidoscopes, and visual complexity generated from big data (Lima 2011). In spite of the popularity of the generative fractals and visual complexity, the question as to why they are beautiful has never been well-addressed. Through our model, we are able to not only explain why visual complexity and generative fractals are beautiful, but also measure and compare the degree of beauty. This kind of beauty exists in the deep structure, rather than in the surface coloring or appearance. This sense of beauty belongs to 90 percent of our self, or our feelings are all the same (Alexander 2002–2005). Importantly, the beauty has positive effects on human well-being. Taylor (2006) found that generative fractals, much like the natural scenes (Ulrich 1984), can help reduce physiological stress. Salingaros (2012) further argued that well-designed architecture and urban environments should have healing effects. 7. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 1 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #3KT2GU 1. Introduction Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #VGSLCH: The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 illustrates the 15 structural properties using the Koch snowflake and a French town layout. Section 3 defines the wholeness as a hierarchical graph and suggests how to quantitatively measure degrees of life for individual centers and the whole. Section 4 presents three case studies applied to an architectural plan and street networks of a city and country for measuring degrees of life or beauty in geographic spaces. Section 5 further discusses the mathematical model of wholeness related to beauty, creation/design, big data, and complexity science. Finally, Section 6 draws conclusions and points to future work. 8. Source: Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space (#BYG3BQ), Bin Jiang, p. 10 Context: #V2MHRV Wholeness as a Hierarchical Graph to Capture the Nature of Space #TXBKLJ 4. Case studies: Computing the degrees of life #3NPEFU 4.2 The streets of Manhattan and Sweden Score: 0.022 Related excerpt #EHYPC4: The three case studies demonstrate that the defined wholeness, or hierarchical graph, captures fairly well human intuitions on the degree of life. Various maps or patterns based on the head/tail breaks classification were found to have a higher degree of life than those using natural breaks through the mirror-of-the-self test (Wu 2015). It was also found that the kind of skills of appreciating the living structure can be improved through training. The reader might have noticed that the hierarchical graph goes beyond the existing geographic representations (Peuquet 2002), since it is topological rather than geometric (Jiang and Claramunt 2004). The topological representation enables us to see the underlying scaling pattern, which constitutes a different way of thinking, the Paretian thinking, for geospatial analysis (Jiang 2015b). The model of wholeness would contribute fundamentally to geodesign by orienting or re-orienting it towards beautiful built and natural environments or with a high degree of wholeness. Geodesign, as currently conceived (e.g., Lee, Dias and Scholten 2014), mainly refers to a set of geospatial techniques and technologies for planning built and natural environments through encouraging wide-range human participation and engagement. However, there is a lack of standards in terms of what a good environment is. The model of wholeness provides a useful tool and indices for measuring the goodness. We therefore believe that geodesign should be considered as the wholeness-extending transformations, or something like the unfolding processes of seeds or embryos (Alexander 2002–2005) towards a high degree of wholeness (see a further discussion in Section 5). This idea of unfolding applies to map design as well, since maps are essentially fractal and possess the same kind of beauty (Jiang 2015c). This is in line with what we have discussed at the beginning of this paper that design should be part of complexity science. The mathematical model of wholeness also points to the fact that the wholeness or degree of life is mathematical and computational (Alexander 2002–2005), and it captures the nature of space, or geographic space in particular. The next section adds some further discussions on the mathematical model of wholeness and its implications in the era of big data. ### 50. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "ARP5U7", "limit": 6, "query": "peak sanctuaries visibility settlements beacon network topography proximity" } ``` ### 51. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 1 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Matching excerpt #U6V3KU: MOUNTAINTOP shrines are common to the religions of many cultures, but in Bronze Age Greece they appear to be limited to Minoan Crete; none has yet been positively identified in Mycenaean Greece or the Cyclades. 1 The purpose of this paper is to examine the topographic position of Minoan peak sanctuaries, that is, their numbers, distribution, proximity to, and relationship with nearby settlements, and finally to consider the apparent change in these patterns that occurs after LM I. 2. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 6 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Matching excerpt #JPQH23: It seems, therefore, that the decline in the number of peak sanctuaries should be more closely associated with the general decline in the number of settlements after LM IB. That there was an abandonment of settlements in east Crete then is not disputed; the cause of that abandonment is more controversial. It may have been caused by the effects of the Thera volcanic ash, or by a Mycenaean invasion, or by a combination of both factors. It has already been shown above how the peak sanctuaries were closely connected with areas of settlement. Therefore, if those settlements were abandoned, obviously their associated peak sanctuaries were also deserted. 3. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 3 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Matching excerpt #WZ2YSX: It appears then that the Minoans chose particular mountain summits for peak sanctuaries. Of the various factors which may have influenced that choice, Rutkowski has rightly emphasized accessibility and proximity to mountain pastures. Another factor appears to have been the general prominence and visibility of the chosen mountain. In the open plains height and reasonable access were most important—i.e. the highest mountain is the obvious one from which to worship the deity. For example, Vrysinas is a solitary mountain in the plain of Rethymnon; Kophinas is the highest mountain of the Asterousia range, and its peak is visible even from Phaistos at the far end of the Mesara plain. Iouktas, in turn, dominates the whole of the north central region of Crete, and its profile, like the face of a bearded man lying down (best seen from the west), can only have added to the Minoan belief in its sanctity. 4. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 4 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Matching excerpt #GDV37F: Naturally, the view from each peak sanctuary is spectacular. As noted above, the peak sanctuaries of east Crete are clustered closely together; so close that one or more other peak sanctuaries are often visible from one another. The most outstanding example of this is Traostalos; from the summit at least six other peak sanctuaries can be seen: Petsopha to the north, Modhi to the north-west, Vigla Zakrou, the tip of Plagia, and Korphi tou Mare, all to the south-west, and Ambelos to the south. A similar situation is found a little further west in central Sitias. The peak sanctuary that dominates the north central plain of Sitias is Zou. South of this mountain are several other peak sanctuaries: Ai Ilia, Xykephalo, and Etia. From all of them Zou can be seen clearly, and the eye is drawn north towards it, as the highest peak on the horizon. In the Iraklion region the same is true, as there Mt. Iouktas is the major focal point for all the other peak sanctuaries as far west as Gonia, and as far east as Karphi. In all these cases it appears that one mountain dominates not only the settlements nearby, but also the other peak sanctuaries within view. 5. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 1 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Matching excerpt #LHHHF7: More than fifty sites are presently claimed as peak sanctuaries all over Crete. 2 Included with this paper is a distribution map of fifty-two sites (FIG. 1). The sites listed are based on Faure's identifications and Rutkowski's own lists, 3 with some additions and deletions based on later research. 4 There is no reason to suppose that the work of identification is at an end; one day the gaps in the distribution map will be filled, and all major Minoan settlements will have their own peak sanctuaries. At present the map shows the greatest proportion of sites grouped in the mountainous region of east Crete. Both Faure and Rutkowski have suggested that it was in Sitias that peak sanctuaries originated. 5 Faure notes the presence of EM III sherds on these eastern peak sanctuaries. 6 Rutkowski, however, shows that almost all peak sanctuaries come within the altitude regions associated with the summer transhumance of sheep and goats. The link between peak sanctuary cult and pastoral farming is also strongly demonstrated by the vast numbers of votive clay figurines of domestic farm animals. East Crete is a predominantly pastoral region; so Rutkowski argues: 'peak sanctuaries came into existence mainly to relieve the fears and cares of the shepherds and cattle breeders'. 7 6. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 5 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Matching excerpt #JAHVNN: We know from the thick layers of ash on all peak sanctuaries that large bonfires must have been lit as part of the ceremonies. From the lines of view noted above, individual bonfires would have been visible from several other peak sanctuaries. The suggested hierarchy then may not have been for a series of ritual pilgrimages, but for a network of sacred beacons which would have united various regions on a single festival night. Perhaps when the gaps in the distribution map are filled, a network of peak sanctuaries may unite all the main inhabited areas of Minoan Crete. Approximate matches 1. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 3 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #N7XTK3: It seems important then that the sanctuary should be seen from the region it served, and also that it should 'see' that region. The reason may simply have been that the most prominent mountain is the best landmark for worshippers to travel to. We do know, however, 2. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 4 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #GDV37F: Naturally, the view from each peak sanctuary is spectacular. As noted above, the peak sanctuaries of east Crete are clustered closely together; so close that one or more other peak sanctuaries are often visible from one another. The most outstanding example of this is Traostalos; from the summit at least six other peak sanctuaries can be seen: Petsopha to the north, Modhi to the north-west, Vigla Zakrou, the tip of Plagia, and Korphi tou Mare, all to the south-west, and Ambelos to the south. A similar situation is found a little further west in central Sitias. The peak sanctuary that dominates the north central plain of Sitias is Zou. South of this mountain are several other peak sanctuaries: Ai Ilia, Xykephalo, and Etia. From all of them Zou can be seen clearly, and the eye is drawn north towards it, as the highest peak on the horizon. In the Iraklion region the same is true, as there Mt. Iouktas is the major focal point for all the other peak sanctuaries as far west as Gonia, and as far east as Karphi. In all these cases it appears that one mountain dominates not only the settlements nearby, but also the other peak sanctuaries within view. 3. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 5 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #JAHVNN: We know from the thick layers of ash on all peak sanctuaries that large bonfires must have been lit as part of the ceremonies. From the lines of view noted above, individual bonfires would have been visible from several other peak sanctuaries. The suggested hierarchy then may not have been for a series of ritual pilgrimages, but for a network of sacred beacons which would have united various regions on a single festival night. Perhaps when the gaps in the distribution map are filled, a network of peak sanctuaries may unite all the main inhabited areas of Minoan Crete. 4. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 3 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #QPEZUU: In some areas, however, it is not the highest point which is chosen. Minoan Palaikastro is sited in a small coastal plain, just north of the mountain Petsopha. This mountain is a ridge, which juts out from the encircling massif. The ridge has three peaks and the sanctuary is sited on the lowest of the three; it is this peak which most directly overlooks the town. From the other summits the view is obscured by lower platforms and cliffs. Faure notes a similar situation with the peak sanctuary at Etia. 12 The shrine is not on the highest peak of the massif, which is Skopeli at 715 m. Rather it is situated on an isolated butte to the north, 100 m lower down. From there, however, one can see the valley plains of Armeni and Chandra. A third example is observable at Zou. 13 The summit is 803 m high, but the peak sanctuary is on the rising edge of a small plateau, north-west of the summit, at an altitude of 725 m. It is only from this high point that the coastal plain of Sitia can be seen; moreover, from the plain this point looks like the summit. 5. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 4 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #3NXXTZ: A recent survey of the Ayiopharango valley in south Crete has shown many of these topographic features on a smaller scale. 14 Within this small area the surveyors identified five small hills as peak sanctuaries: sites E4A, E12, E18, W11, MOW1. Each 'peak sanctuary' overlooks a small farmstead and associated tholos tomb. It is suggested that each of these hills was the local shrine of the family/clan who lived in the farmstead and buried their dead in the tholos. The hills are quite low and the surveyors suggested that the site E12, in the centre of the valley, may have been a focus for the whole valley community, not just the local farm. From this and other evidence Bintliff has developed the idea of a sacred hierarchy of peak sanctuaries and other shrines. 15 Furthermore, using a Mexican anthropological study as a model, he goes on to suggest a 'series of ritual pilgrimages' to these shrines 'which unite ever larger units of the regional community'. 16 That is to say, the people near Xykephalo and Etia would have visited not only their own peak sanctuary but also that of Zou, which dominated the whole region. 6. Source: The Topography of Minoan Peak Sanctuaries (#ARP5U7), A. A. D. Peatfield, p. 2 Context: #S9HW3P THE TOPOGRAPHY OF MINOAN PEAK SANCTUARIES Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #65886B: The altitude of peak sanctuaries varies considerably. Generally, the lowest are around 200 m, e.g. Petsopha at 215 m. At the other end of the scale sanctuaries are also found at over 1000 m, e.g. Karphi at 1148 m, Kastellos at 1160 m, Keria at 1168 m. Despite this huge difference in altitudes Rutkowski has pointed out that all peak sanctuaries fall within certain vegetation zones. 8 Referring to the work of Philippon, 9 Rutkowski has shown that all peak sanctuaries, irrespective of height, are associated with altitude regions that allow for some sort of farming, arable or pastoral, often both. Therefore, today, routes up to the summit pass through vineyards and groves of olive and fruit trees; they climb past mountain meadows of fragrant herb bushes where bees gather nectar, and sheep and goats graze in summer. Indeed, it is striking just how many peak sanctuaries have a gentle slope on one side of the summit, or a high flat area below it, where flocks are still pastured today: e.g. Petsopha, Pyrgos, Vrysinas, Traostalos, Modhi, and Zou. ### 52. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 6, "query": "artist control flow maps real-time simulation approximation water rendering production" } ``` ### 53. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Water-rendering literature overview (#4CB2WQ) Matching note #4CB2WQ: The water-rendering corpus organizes around a recurring hybrid strategy: simulate only the low-frequency/structural behavior needed for motion, then add high-frequency visual detail and optical cues cheaply. The survey separates deep-water parametric/spectral methods from shallow-water fluid methods and identifies foam, spray, and light interaction as separate realism layers (#4S5XNT, #CZNWCP). River methods use coarse or procedural velocity fields plus advected wave textures: Arnold et al. combine 2D Navier–Stokes, hydrostatic pressure columns, and texture advection (#8KBMFE, #T9Y2PR); Yu et al. compute local steady flow and use screen-space sampled wave sprites for huge terrains (#3UZ7TP, #AL6YQ9); their later Lagrangian texture-advection method uses deformable particle grids to preserve both flow and texture spectrum (#DZCPD6, #KSH8JS). Vlachos's Portal 2 production method is the cheapest end of this continuum: artist-authored flow maps distort two normal-map layers, with offsets and noise hiding repetition/pulsing (#6ELMAT, #XVFV3N). Shallow-water work adds effects a height field cannot express: Thürey et al. detect steep fronts and spawn connected-particle sheets for overturning waves, drops, and foam (#KHRCTA, #XFKY8Q); Ojeda and Susín layer FFT/noise normals, advected foam, photon caustics, and screen-space reflection/refraction over a shallow-water simulation (#BVUXWL, #PBZNNB). Scherzer et al. target fully dynamic particle fluids, using screen-space depth/thickness layers, adaptive curvature-flow smoothing, and Weber-number-based volumetric foam (#G3TYUA, #YJNSYU). Surface Wavelets is the strongest large-scale wave paper: it simulates slowly varying amplitudes over space/frequency/direction on a coarse grid, reconstructs detailed waves separately, supports obstacles and artistic control, and runs a 4 km × 4 km scene at 60 fps (#RFLQDX, #764D8D, #WKY9MT); it cannot handle breaking waves or splashes because it is linear (#YWWZAM). Specialized cheap methods include halftone-mask foam dissipation with under 3% overhead (#KFWVK3, #V5XDSY), Bézier-curve river networks with streaming normal maps (#QGESFA, #MSQQ8G), and distance-dependent switching among Stokes, cosine, and bump-mapped wave models (#H2E2UR, #EYM9N6). 2. Source: Procedural Riverscapes (#AK7NGE), A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial, p. 2 Context: #JJE8HN Procedural Riverscapes #FF5JSX 3. Workflow Matching excerpt #QH5ARN: Next, the river network is refined, based on this flow data and the geometry of the riverbed, by appropriately placing localized animated primitives that represent cycling water patterns, such as waves, whirlpools, and cascades. Overlapping primitives are combined using blend operators into a hierarchical blend-flow tree that defines the animated surface of the water as a function f(\mathbf{p}, t) . This procedural function can be directly evaluated at any point and time without the need for simulation. Finally, the combined procedural river representation can be rendered directly at real-time rates or passed on to an off-line process to generate photo-realistic images. 3. Source: Real-time Rendering of River Networks (#MVUJ8Z), Quintijn Hendrickx, Rafael Bidarra, Ruben M. Smelik, p. 0 Context: #BTQCB6 Real-time Rendering of River Networks Matching excerpt #QGESFA: This poster presents an efficient technique for real-time rendering of complex river networks without using any kind of particle system. Instead, Bézier curves and streaming normal maps are used to simulate the flow of water through rivers. The curves represent the geometric features (path and width) of a river. Multiple quadratic Bézier curve segments are linked together to create more complex river curves and junctions. 4. Source: A Layered Particle-Based Fluid Model for Real-Time Rendering of Water (#RBS5K6), Daniel Scherzer, Florian Bagar, Michael Wimmer, p. 0 Context: #5NFAXU A Layered Particle-Based Fluid Model for Real-Time Rendering of Water #KGMBXL Abstract Matching excerpt #G3TYUA: We present a physically based real-time water simulation and rendering method that brings volumetric foam to the real-time domain, significantly increasing the realism of dynamic fluids. We do this by combining a particle-based fluid model that is capable of accounting for the formation of foam with a layered rendering approach that is able to account for the volumetric properties of water and foam. Foam formation is simulated through Weber number thresholding. For rendering, we approximate the resulting water and foam volumes by storing their respective boundary surfaces in depth maps. This allows us to calculate the attenuation of light rays that pass through these volumes very efficiently. We also introduce an adaptive curvature flow filter that produces consistent fluid surfaces from particles independent of the viewing distance. 5. Source: Advected river textures (#WZMZGY), Dirk Arnold, Stephen Brooks, Tim Burrell, p. 0 Context: #JCB5RE Advected river textures Matching excerpt #VPL9P5: We present a new method for the realistic real-time simulation of rivers. Our solution includes a 2D fluid solver that simulates the flow of a river's surface, an efficient method for adaptively computing 3D flow information and an animated 3D procedural wave texture that is advected through the fluid via advection particles in order to mimic the highly detailed fluid surfaces that are characteristic of rivers. Our technique that couples animated texture advection with a pseudo-3D fluid simulation produces stable results that are representative of large-scale real-world rivers and suitable for use in real-time applications. Our system surpasses prior work on real-time river rendering both with regards to efficiency and visual quality, which we establish through the rendering of rivers tens of kilometers long. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 6. Source: Advected river textures (#WZMZGY), Dirk Arnold, Stephen Brooks, Tim Burrell, p. 0 Context: #JCB5RE Advected river textures #DQ7LJZ Introduction Matching excerpt #EWXZK3: Real-time fluid simulation is a challenging problem in which “no single method (exists) that can capture all the subtle effects of water” 1 . Our work specifically focuses on real-time river rendering which is problematic for several reasons: the arbitrary 3D terrain geometry of the riverbed must be taken into account, rivers often include situations with both shallow and deep water, even slow moving rivers have highly detailed dynamic geometries, and rivers are generally very large, stretching many kilometers. Rendering large scale river flows for real-time applications is therefore difficult because of the complexity involved in generating a fluid surface that is both detailed enough to be visually realistic and efficient enough to be interactive. Approximate matches 1. Source: Procedural Riverscapes (#AK7NGE), A. Peytavie, B. Benes, E. Galin, E. Guérin, J. Gain, T. Dupont, Y. Cortial, p. 2 Context: #JJE8HN Procedural Riverscapes #FF5JSX 3. Workflow Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #QH5ARN: Next, the river network is refined, based on this flow data and the geometry of the riverbed, by appropriately placing localized animated primitives that represent cycling water patterns, such as waves, whirlpools, and cascades. Overlapping primitives are combined using blend operators into a hierarchical blend-flow tree that defines the animated surface of the water as a function f(\mathbf{p}, t) . This procedural function can be directly evaluated at any point and time without the need for simulation. Finally, the combined procedural river representation can be rendered directly at real-time rates or passed on to an off-line process to generate photo-realistic images. 2. Source: Real-time Rendering of Enhanced Shallow Water Fluid Simulations (#CWC7H9), Antonio Susín, Jesús Ojeda, p. 0 Context: #3XLN3C Real-time Rendering of Enhanced Shallow Water Fluid Simulations #SDDXFP Abstract Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #BVUXWL: The visualization of simulated fluids is critical to understand their motion, with certain light effects restricted or with added computational complexity in the implementation if real-time simulation is required. We propose some techniques that improve the rendering quality of an enhanced shallow waters simulation. To improve the overall appeal of the fluid representation, lower scale details are added to the fluid, coupling external non-physical simulations, and advecting generated surface foam. We simulate caustics by raytracing photons in light and screen-space, and apply refraction and reflections also in screen-space, through a number of render passes. Finally, it is shown how a reasonably sized fluid simulation is executed and rendered at interactive framerates with consumer-level hardware. 3. Source: Real-time Rendering of Enhanced Shallow Water Fluid Simulations (#CWC7H9), Antonio Susín, Jesús Ojeda, p. 0 Context: #3XLN3C Real-time Rendering of Enhanced Shallow Water Fluid Simulations #D9SXF3 1. Introduction Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #DHJP5S: With present fluid simulations being performed in GPUs at interactive framerates, we also need realistic visualizations which reproduce these effects of the light. In our case, we start from a heightfield fluid simulation enhanced with particles for the simulation of splashes in breaking wave conditions, like the ones proposed in [1] or [2], which are also fully coupled with dynamic objects. From there, we aim to provide these expected, light-based effects, namely refractions, reflections and caustics. 4. Source: Scalable real‐time animation of rivers (#XDESU9), Eric Bruneton, Fabrice Neyret, Nicolas Holzschuch, Qizhi Yu, p. 3 Context: #B9LYTR Scalable real-time animation of rivers #XF2N2Y 3. Overview #LFKVYW Algorithm 1 Scalable real-time animation of rivers Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #B6RXPQ: 1: loop 2: for all new visible terrain quads do 3: Compute the quad's channels network. 4: Compute the stream function boundary values. 5: Build a structure for fast distance evaluations. 6: end for 7: Advect particles with the flow in world space. 8: Resample particles to keep uniform screen density. 9: Render wave sprites associated with particles. 10: end loop 5. Source: Scalable real‐time animation of rivers (#XDESU9), Eric Bruneton, Fabrice Neyret, Nicolas Holzschuch, Qizhi Yu, p. 9 Context: #B9LYTR Scalable real-time animation of rivers #RD97PY 8. Conclusion and future work Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #SKJ4EL: We have presented a high performance framework to render animated rivers on very large terrains, allowing close views as well as large views. Our method fits well with real-time navigation of a large-scale virtual environment (Google Earth, simulators, games — although there is only limited interaction with the water), and is also controllable by designers. 6. Source: Scalable real‐time animation of rivers (#XDESU9), Eric Bruneton, Fabrice Neyret, Nicolas Holzschuch, Qizhi Yu, p. 1 Context: #B9LYTR Scalable real-time animation of rivers #UJRUGW 1. Introduction Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #U7FSJS: Many applications today are giving the user the ability to explore a virtual world of very large scale, possibly even unbounded. For practical reasons many of them (such as Google Earth) consist mostly of static terrain and geometry. The simulation of flowing fluids, such as rivers and lava flows would greatly improve the realism of these virtual worlds, but would also introduce scalability issues: in a typical situation, the observer is looking at the virtual world at close range, and thus paying attention to small scale details such as waves and ripples. Combined with the large scale of the world itself, this makes computational fluid dynamics solutions impractical, especially for interactive exploration. Most game engines, such as Crysis', use a constant flow, which has visible flaws, namely that the flow is going through obstacles. ### 54. Assistant Looking across the corpus, it feels less like a collection of unrelated graphics papers and more like an investigation of one large question: > **How can landscapes be generated as evolving, intelligible wholes rather than assembled as static scenery?** Several strong throughlines emerge. ## 1. Landscapes are processes, not finished objects Many papers replace “generate the final shape” with **simulate or encode a history of formation**. - Trails emerge as walkers repeatedly alter the ground, making some routes more attractive while unused traces disappear (#KXXUJY). - Villages grow through reciprocal changes between buildings, roads, parcels, and terrain rather than from a predetermined plan (#2LHPV2). - River terrain can be generated from an underlying drainage network instead of creating arbitrary topography and adding rivers afterward (#7CSK9U). - Erosion becomes an adjustable history: the analytical erosion paper effectively turns geological age into a parameter the designer can explore interactively (#CEANXB). - Alexander’s structure-preserving transformations likewise treat design as a sequence in which each state grows out of the latent organization of the previous one (#MACZGC). The shared proposition is that **the history of generation is part of the structure**. A convincing landscape is not merely a plausible surface; its parts should appear to have become what they are through a coherent sequence. ## 2. The environment acts as external memory One of the most interesting conceptual links is between trails, settlements, and sediment. In the active-walker model, people communicate indirectly through the ground: a walker leaves a trace, later walkers perceive it, and repeated use amplifies it. The landscape becomes an external storage medium for collective information (#E8PUZ9, #653HKK). This creates an interaction between past and present walkers without centralized planning (#NDVFZG). Legacy sediment describes almost the same principle on a different temporal scale. Past land use remains stored materially in terraces and floodplains, affecting river behavior centuries after the original disturbance (#3YVSD7, #5KWFJP). Tarolli’s “sociocultural palimpsest” broadens it further: successive societies inherit, overwrite, and reactivate older landscape structures (#EBG5LP). So roads, trails, terraces, parcels, and sediment deposits can all be understood as **material memories that constrain future action**. ## 3. Form emerges from negotiations among competing constraints Across the corpus, convincing form rarely comes from optimizing one variable. A pedestrian wants a direct route but also prefers an established path; the resulting network negotiates between shortness and shared infrastructure (#JN4H6B). Mountain trails need an even richer model: slope limits, directional persistence, and the asymmetric behavior of ascending and descending walkers are all required to produce convincing zigzags (#S2VCY4). The village generator similarly combines access, slope, water, sociability, worship, defense, and visibility rather than optimizing distance alone (#P6XUT4). Road generation uses anisotropic costs to negotiate among slope, curvature, obstacles, bridges, tunnels, and existing routes. Hydrological terrain methods negotiate physical consistency against directability and computation time (#MYMRA9). This suggests that characteristic landscape forms often arise not from a single “ideal” solution but from **stable compromises among incompatible pressures**. ## 4. Human and natural form are difficult to separate The anthropogenic-geomorphology papers make this explicit, but it is present throughout the corpus. A road network can resemble a drainage network; agricultural terraces can resemble river terraces; pits can have natural, domestic, ritual, or military origins (#HL962L, #UMTTKT). Geometry alone is therefore insufficient. Interpretation requires relationships among features, their material context, and the larger system in which they occur. That is the point of moving from isolated **features** to **sociocultural fingerprints**: a road, ditch, or terrace may be ambiguous, but their aggregate organization may reveal a society’s systems of settlement, subsistence, transport, ritual, and authority (#LQCHXR, #2YJDU2). This also presents a challenge for procedural generation: a visually convincing pattern is not necessarily a historically or socially meaningful one. A generator needs some model of **why the features coexist**, not just templates for their shapes. ## 5. Visibility is a genuine landscape-forming force The Minoan peak-sanctuary paper makes a particularly nice connection to the village generator’s “geographical domination” criterion. Peak sanctuaries were not always placed on the objectively highest summit. Sometimes a lower point was selected because it had the strongest visual relationship with the settlement it served (#QPEZUU). Groups of sanctuaries could see one another, with a dominant peak acting as a regional focal point (#GDV37F). Peatfield even proposes that ceremonial fires turned them into a network of sacred beacons (#JAHVNN). This shows that topography is not experienced simply as elevation or slope. It is also structured by: - what can be seen, - what appears dominant from inhabited places, - what can “see” a community, - and which locations form a visual network. That could enrich procedural settlement models: “prominence” should perhaps be measured relationally from roads, settlements, and other landmarks rather than as raw elevation. ## 6. Hierarchy is the recurring representation of both nature and design River systems, road networks, settlement structures, image substructures, and Alexanderian centers are repeatedly represented as **nested hierarchies or graphs**. The hydrological terrain paper starts with a hierarchical drainage graph and turns its branches into rivers, watersheds, valleys, and terrain patches (#CL3N2Q). Procedural Riverscapes combines local water phenomena into a hierarchical blend-flow tree (#QH5ARN). Tarolli moves from individual features to landscape-scale fingerprints. Alexander moves from local centers to the larger whole. Jiang makes this very literal by representing wholeness as a directed graph and using PageRank to estimate the “life” of individual centers. A whole is considered more living when it contains a deep scaling hierarchy of many weak or small centers and relatively few strong or large ones (#EHDJCS). The common intuition is that coherent complexity requires **organization across scales**—not just many details, but details nested into progressively larger structures. ## 7. Generation is increasingly treated as conversation, not automation The co-creation papers provide an important corrective to parameter-heavy procedural systems. The industry-oriented mixed-initiative paper argues that a usable generator must: 1. preserve designer control, 2. maintain a very short creative feedback loop, 3. fit existing production workflows (#QT226Z). Quality-diversity methods go further: instead of returning one supposedly optimal artifact, they expose a map of many good but behaviorally different possibilities. The designer explores this “illuminated” design space and chooses what matters for the current task (#YU83S3, #VBGH4T). Explainable AI adds that a designer needs a workable mental model of how inputs become outputs. A black-box road generator, for example, should communicate how it reads terrain and interprets design concepts rather than forcing the designer to learn entirely through trial and error (#LLDEFE, #LUFV57). This contrasts sharply with the village generator’s roughly 150 parameters per village type (#EYJ8SX). The underlying generation is interesting, but the corpus collectively suggests that the better interface may be **examples, sketches, visible trade-offs, and iterative suggestions**, not a giant control panel. ## 8. Plausibility often matters more than complete physical simulation The water and terrain papers repeatedly ask: **what actually needs to be simulated, and what only needs to look or behave convincingly?** Procedural Riverscapes represents waves, whirlpools, and cascades as local animated primitives that can be evaluated without fluid simulation (#QH5ARN). Other systems combine coarse flow solvers with detailed textures, particles, foam, caustics, and normal maps. This gives the perceptual signs of complex water without paying for a full simulation at every scale (#VPL9P5, #BVUXWL). The analytical erosion paper makes a similar move: rather than stepping through thousands of simulated years, it solves for a plausible landscape at a chosen age (#CEANXB). This is not simply “faking it.” It is a recurring strategy of **selective fidelity**: - preserve the structure that carries meaning, - approximate expensive intermediate processes, - add perceptually important detail separately, - keep the result interactive enough to design with. ## 9. The corpus contains a productive disagreement about “good” form Most procedural papers can evaluate technical properties such as drainage correctness, connectivity, playability, or collision avoidance. But they struggle to evaluate whether a result is beautiful, coherent, or alive. Alexander proposes that each transformation should strengthen a local latent center while also strengthening the larger whole (#5BC6M2). Jiang tries to operationalize this through hierarchy, PageRank, and scaling depth (#25Z8H8). The structural-beauty paper goes as far as defining beauty from the number and hierarchy of substructures—and provocatively reports *Blue Poles* as more structurally beautiful than the *Mona Lisa* (#2XX4AM). This creates a useful tension: - the procedural-generation papers have implementable mechanisms but comparatively thin accounts of qualitative goodness; - Alexander has a rich account of qualitative goodness but admits that structure-preserving transformation is not yet fully formalized (#5F4JYM); - Jiang provides computable measures, but those measures risk collapsing coherence into hierarchy and substructure counts. That gap may be one of the most fertile areas in the corpus: **connecting process-based generation to a defensible account of wholeness without reducing beauty to a simplistic score**. Overall, the strongest synthesis is: > A landscape becomes convincing when local agents and processes leave persistent traces; those traces influence later changes; constraints operate differently across scales; and the designer can understand and redirect the unfolding without destroying its accumulated structure. ### 55. User tell me some interesting specifics, details, surprising things, or just beautiful things from the villages papers and other papers ### 56. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XW22YY", "limit": 8, "query": "generative code sequence neighborhood participation land beautiful unfolding specific example" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "LXV9AT", "limit": 8, "query": "trail alignment drainage grade reversals curvilinear control points sustainable beautiful landform" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "V4TQYB", "limit": 8, "query": "tensor field street network brush editing radial grid user control" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "MH5J8D", "limit": 6, "query": "Beautimeter GPT 15 properties accuracy agreement surprising result" } ``` ### 57. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 1 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Matching excerpt #5VY5MT: The generative codes we are concerned with in this paper, are the processes specific to the environment: our world, and its construction, especially in areas that we may roughly call “neighborhoods.” They are, to be more precise, codes which are capable of driving, or guiding, the organic unfolding of a neighborhood (new or existing or partly existing, green field, or brown field), in such a way that the neighborhood and the people who do and will live in it and work there, have a good chance of flourishing, personally, economically, and ecologically. Like the example of biological generative code, such a code is, necessarily, highly complex (in its effects) though simple (in its own structure). It is necessarily dynamic. It specifies processes, happening under a variety of types of control, which will contribute to the proper unfolding of the whole, and delineates the interaction of the people concerned in such a way that what results may, with good fortune, become a living neighborhood. 2. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 2 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Matching excerpt #44KMMZ: The word “generative” also has an additional and crucial meaning. In a generative code, there is always a sequence, an order, to the instructions. The specifications which are provided by the code not only describe geometrical features (as in a form-based code like a zoning ordinance), but also describe the approximate sequence in which these features must be introduced to help the neighborhood become whole. This aspect of generative codes, novel for urban codes, may be described as the specification of an “unfolding.” 3. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 2 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Matching excerpt #2SLYHA: So this generative feature of urban codes -- that the code must contain a description of the approximate sequence in which the elements of the code are best brought forth in order that a living whole may unfold successfully from them -- is natural and ordinary. It is surprising that it has not previously been noticed, or implemented on a significant scale in anything we currently view as an urban code. Yet it is the decisive aspect which makes a code give life to a neighborhood. 3 4. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 11 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #MU7M8B The Process of Procurement Matching excerpt #Y9C9JT: The generative code is the document which oversees this process, and provides the chart and organizational backbone for the project manager’s actions, and for the weaving in and out of different players at appropriate moments in the process. This code sets out, as clearly as possible, the steps which must be taken, roughly with the order in which they must be taken, and with the people who are most appropriate, at each, to define the decisions as the whole unfolds. And this generative code is constructed so that the whole – the neighborhood, and all its personal and individual details, and all its subtle adaptations of buildings to one another, and to the land, are taken care of, gently, by the way construction management, and contracts, are handled. 5. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 1 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Matching excerpt #8Z49EC: An example of a generative code in another context, is the thing known in surgical medicine as a “procedure.” It defines a surgical operation, in such a way that it can be learnt, and transmitted. Those who have learned it are able to apply the procedure to widely different individuals, with unique circumstances, and it will produce unique results, according to the idiosyncrasies of the patient. 6. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 2 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Matching excerpt #KZ8VHA: The idea of unfolding is entirely straightforward. It simply acknowledges what has not been acknowledged up until now in urban codes, namely: That the order in which things are introduced is as vital as the specification of the geometrical features. This is common sense, and ordinary. It is a natural part of the specification of a surgical procedure, where sequence is paramount. It is a feature of virtually all biological specification and coding, where it is now known that DNA alone only bears a part of the responsibility for the ensuing form, and that the larger part is borne by the unfolding processes inherent in cell dynamics. 2 Unfolding sequence is even a natural feature of a recipe for baking a cake. There we are very familiar with the fact that an approximate adherence to the right sequence is at least as important as specifications of the right ingredients, if not, indeed, more important. 7. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 17 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #7PFDSQ Placing Practical Emphasis on Respect For Individuals, Respect For Land, and Respect for Continuity. Matching excerpt #MLY926: From what has been said before, the morphogenetic sequence – the sequence which permits coherent unfolding of the whole – does not easily fit together with the present practice of development, whether this be free private enterprise development as practiced in the US, western Europe; or whether it be the kind of government sponsored housing undertaken by local authorities or federal and state governments. 20 8. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 17 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #7PFDSQ Placing Practical Emphasis on Respect For Individuals, Respect For Land, and Respect for Continuity. #ZKEKTW So the central practical question is this: Matching excerpt #HX89YE: Are there ways of modifying the bank-development-society machine, which allow morphogenetic unfolding to occur, and which therefore allow respect for people and land, to be assured by the unfolding of plans, designs, and buildings – and all to be done in a way in which clients, inhabitants, buildings, banks, developers, and local authorities become encouraged to begin making a change in this direction? Approximate matches 1. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 2 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #44KMMZ: The word “generative” also has an additional and crucial meaning. In a generative code, there is always a sequence, an order, to the instructions. The specifications which are provided by the code not only describe geometrical features (as in a form-based code like a zoning ordinance), but also describe the approximate sequence in which these features must be introduced to help the neighborhood become whole. This aspect of generative codes, novel for urban codes, may be described as the specification of an “unfolding.” 2. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 2 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #2SLYHA: So this generative feature of urban codes -- that the code must contain a description of the approximate sequence in which the elements of the code are best brought forth in order that a living whole may unfold successfully from them -- is natural and ordinary. It is surprising that it has not previously been noticed, or implemented on a significant scale in anything we currently view as an urban code. Yet it is the decisive aspect which makes a code give life to a neighborhood. 3 3. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 1 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #5VY5MT: The generative codes we are concerned with in this paper, are the processes specific to the environment: our world, and its construction, especially in areas that we may roughly call “neighborhoods.” They are, to be more precise, codes which are capable of driving, or guiding, the organic unfolding of a neighborhood (new or existing or partly existing, green field, or brown field), in such a way that the neighborhood and the people who do and will live in it and work there, have a good chance of flourishing, personally, economically, and ecologically. Like the example of biological generative code, such a code is, necessarily, highly complex (in its effects) though simple (in its own structure). It is necessarily dynamic. It specifies processes, happening under a variety of types of control, which will contribute to the proper unfolding of the whole, and delineates the interaction of the people concerned in such a way that what results may, with good fortune, become a living neighborhood. 4. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 2 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #FSQNXF: Another generative code is the system which allows a plant to unfold from a seed – so far, even now, not yet precisely known in full detail. It used to be thought that the genetic information in the DNA was all that you needed to define the process, and so the end product. It is now known that the situation is very much more complicated, and consists of interlocking processes, taking place in different organs and organelles, chemical concentrations, enzymes, and interlocking sequences of action and production. 5. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 1 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #8Z49EC: An example of a generative code in another context, is the thing known in surgical medicine as a “procedure.” It defines a surgical operation, in such a way that it can be learnt, and transmitted. Those who have learned it are able to apply the procedure to widely different individuals, with unique circumstances, and it will produce unique results, according to the idiosyncrasies of the patient. 6. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 3 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #NTG3W9: When generative codes are used in a process of development, the following characteristics typically get woven into the social-spatial fabric: 7. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 12 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #MU7M8B The Process of Procurement #9DEDCQ Independent, Community-Oriented Project Management: The Operational Underpinning of a Generative Code Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #MXC7CN: How then, is this to work? Most important, how does a generative code make it work? 8. Source: Generative Codes: The Path to Building Welcoming, Beautiful, Sustainable Neighborhoods (#XW22YY), Brian Hanson, Christopher Alexander, Maggie Moore Alexander, Michael Mehaffy, Randall Schmidt, p. 1 Context: #CU9CAT Generative Codes #PSAS4W What is a Generative Code? Score: 0.023 Related excerpt #46GKMH: A generative code is a system of explicit steps, for creating such a fabric. It defines the end product, not by specifying the end-product itself, but by defining the steps that must be used to reach the end product. Unlike a process which defines the end product, and then leaves the getting there to the developer, the processes initiated by a generative code assure that the end product will be unique each time it occurs, and will be unique in just the ways that matter. 1 ### 58. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 33 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #XSQ2CN 5.7.3. Maximum Sustainable Linear Grades #BRLU95 5.7.3.9. Evaluating and Interpreting the Criteria Matching excerpt #76SGWC: Once the maximum linear grade has been identified between the major control points, it can be compared to the average linear grade determined by the rise over run calculation. If the average grade is steeper than the maximum sustainable grade, the trail alignment needs to be adjusted (lengthened) to conform to the grade limit. Using the above example of two control points that are 2,000 feet apart with a 200 foot elevation difference, if the maximum sustainable linear grade is determined to be 8% and the average linear grade between the two control points is 10%, then additional linear run must be provided to reduce the average linear grade. To determine the additional linear run needed, divide the elevation difference between the two controls by the maximum sustainable linear grade (i.e., 200 \text{ ft} \div 0.08 = 2,500 \text{ ft} ), then subtract the existing distance between the two points to determine the additional length needed (i.e., 2,500 \text{ ft} - 2,000 \text{ ft} = 500 \text{ ft} ). To reduce the average linear grade to 8%, an additional 500 lineal feet of trail must be added to the alignment. If landbase, resource, aesthetic, or construction issues prohibit lengthening the trail in a curvilinear fashion, then trail features and structures such as topographic turns, climbing turns, and switchbacks may be needed. Steps may also be a potential solution. These trail features and structures must be placed at appropriate locations and become minor control points. 2. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 24 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #M2FCT4 5.6. Maintaining Natural Drainage Matching excerpt #EZ5S8W: Natural flow is maintained by laying out trails on the contour of the land, which helps facilitate natural sheet drainage. This type of trail layout is called curvilinear alignment (crossing contour lines at nearly flat or oblique angles). Curvilinear layout keeps the trail alignment nearly perpendicular to natural sheet runoff, and requires following the landform, pulling in and out of swales and crenulations. Pulling in, dipping down, and pulling up and out of drain swales (even in the most subtle crenulations) ensures that the trail alignment cannot capture or divert flow. This technique effectively de-couples the trail from the watershed and eliminates or minimizes the need for drainage structures such as grade reversals and water bars that use the trail to capture water and drain it onto the slope below the trail where rills and gullies can form. Curvilinear alignment does not alter the flow of watercourses bisected by the trail, which is critical to plant and animal communities associated with wetland and riparian corridors. (See Figure 5.3.) Photo 5.19 illustrates how a trail gradually dips down and pulls out of an ephemeral watercourse (top) and contours up the hillslope (bottom). 3. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 52 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #NQEU6U 5.7.6. Final Grade Reconciliation Matching excerpt #JTLEZB: Once all major and minor control points are located within the trail corridor, the average and maximum sustainable linear grades between control points are identified. These grades can then be compared to the designed trail grade. If there are no conflicts, the trail alignment can be finalized. The final linear grade between each control point must be equal to or less than the maximum sustainable linear grade and the designed grade, which may require reconciling segments where the average linear grade exceeds these limits. Additional linear run can be obtained through topographical turns, climbing turns, or switchbacks. Engineered and constructed solutions may also be necessary to work through minor controls and reduce linear grades, which can require many days in the field. By completing this trail design process, the designer will gain a thorough knowledge of the landform and be aware of all the issues and proposed design solutions. By the end of field reconnaissance, the designer should have explored every possible routing and selected one that represents the best possible alignment. For pedestrian trails, the designer can now determine if the proposed alignment meets accessibility standards. By now, every option should have been explored to design and construct an accessible trail. 4. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 29 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #D9NVQC 5.7.2. Major Control Points and Average Linear Grades Matching excerpt #56N3J2: Mapping software can also be used to calculate elevation changes and average linear grades. However, these programs provide only rough estimates and should only be used prior to field validation. Once this calculation is performed, the linear grade between the points is compared to the maximum sustainable linear grade of the landform and accessible trail design standards. By breaking the trail corridor into individual segments between control points, the trail alignment is divided into manageable units. Segmentation is an important step that greatly simplifies layout and design. 5. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 28 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #D9NVQC 5.7.2. Major Control Points and Average Linear Grades Matching excerpt #S47DP4: Once the existing information is reviewed and assimilated, the major control points between the starting and ending of the trail are identified. These points are identified during the literature review process and confirmed by field reconnaissance. Major control points include highway accesses, railway crossings, large bodies of water, massive landslides, avalanche chutes, talus slopes, and steep cliffs. Generally, these points are where the new trail alignment must pass through (“positive controls”) or avoid (“negative controls”). After these points are confirmed and established, the broad trail corridor is narrowed and adjusted to accommodate these locations. Mapping software can be used to draw the trail corridor following the principles of curvilinear alignment. This corridor is adjusted to avoid or join the major points. Most mapping software will calculate the distance of the trail corridor drawn. The average linear grade between major control points is then calculated by dividing the elevation difference between two control points by the linear distance between the points. For example, if the elevation difference between the two control points is 200 feet and the linear distance between them is 2,000 feet, the average linear grade will be 10% (i.e., 200 \text{ ft.} \div 2,000 \text{ ft.} = 0.10 or 10%). 6. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 27 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #M2FCT4 5.6. Maintaining Natural Drainage Matching excerpt #SW8LMB: Constructing a trail bed on a hillslope rather than flat ground will also enhance the trail's drainage performance. Constructing into the hillslope will facilitate more efficient overland sheet flow drainage. When the sheet flow runs down the cut bank in a thin film it accelerates, giving it the momentum to flow across the trail bed and down the hillslope. (See Photo 5.20.) Curvilinear alignment combined with sustainable linear grades, hillside construction, and outsloping prevents water diversion and accumulation. Retaining the landform's natural drainage patterns is the key to sustainable trails. 7. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 36 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #9WNHGK 5.7.5. Field Reconnaissance #7JBFFE 5.7.5.1. Minor Control Point Identification Matching excerpt #AWUAYY: Minor control points are locations that the trail should go to or avoid. They differ from major control points in that the issues they present may be resolved through engineering or construction techniques. For example, if routing a trail over a small rock outcrop in the middle of the trail alignment exceeds the maximum sustainable linear grade, the trail may be constructed through the outcrop by excavation, retaining wall construction, or a combination of the two. Identification and mapping of minor control points further narrows the trail corridor and breaks it into smaller segments. Segmenting the trail corridor in this way simplifies the layout process and provides the designer with information necessary to more easily flag the trail alignment. (See Figures 5.5 and 5.6.) 8. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 57 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #8BZAPC 5.7.7. Flagging the Trail Alignment #AGRR47 5.7.7.1. Initial Flagging Process #SKHQPC SIGHTING FOR GRADE WITH CLINOMETER Matching excerpt #G9NCTS: Curvilinear alignment should be carefully followed during flagging. So that the trail is kept nearly perpendicular to overland sheet flow, linear grade shots should be taken between all topographic breaks in the landform including subtle breaks. To ensure the trail will not accumulate or divert water, natural drainage patterns should be maintained, including dipping the trail in and out of topographic watercourse features, such as small swales and undulations. Additionally, linear grades should be adjusted relative to changes in the percent of hillslope to prevent the trail from becoming fall line and able to capture and convey the hillside sheet flow. A properly laid out trail will be nearly hydrologically invisible on the landform and will prevent water from entering and running down the trail. Approximate matches 1. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 24 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #M2FCT4 5.6. Maintaining Natural Drainage Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #EZ5S8W: Natural flow is maintained by laying out trails on the contour of the land, which helps facilitate natural sheet drainage. This type of trail layout is called curvilinear alignment (crossing contour lines at nearly flat or oblique angles). Curvilinear layout keeps the trail alignment nearly perpendicular to natural sheet runoff, and requires following the landform, pulling in and out of swales and crenulations. Pulling in, dipping down, and pulling up and out of drain swales (even in the most subtle crenulations) ensures that the trail alignment cannot capture or divert flow. This technique effectively de-couples the trail from the watershed and eliminates or minimizes the need for drainage structures such as grade reversals and water bars that use the trail to capture water and drain it onto the slope below the trail where rills and gullies can form. Curvilinear alignment does not alter the flow of watercourses bisected by the trail, which is critical to plant and animal communities associated with wetland and riparian corridors. (See Figure 5.3.) Photo 5.19 illustrates how a trail gradually dips down and pulls out of an ephemeral watercourse (top) and contours up the hillslope (bottom). 2. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 57 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #8BZAPC 5.7.7. Flagging the Trail Alignment #AGRR47 5.7.7.1. Initial Flagging Process #SKHQPC SIGHTING FOR GRADE WITH CLINOMETER Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #G9NCTS: Curvilinear alignment should be carefully followed during flagging. So that the trail is kept nearly perpendicular to overland sheet flow, linear grade shots should be taken between all topographic breaks in the landform including subtle breaks. To ensure the trail will not accumulate or divert water, natural drainage patterns should be maintained, including dipping the trail in and out of topographic watercourse features, such as small swales and undulations. Additionally, linear grades should be adjusted relative to changes in the percent of hillslope to prevent the trail from becoming fall line and able to capture and convey the hillside sheet flow. A properly laid out trail will be nearly hydrologically invisible on the landform and will prevent water from entering and running down the trail. 3. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 27 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #M2FCT4 5.6. Maintaining Natural Drainage Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #SW8LMB: Constructing a trail bed on a hillslope rather than flat ground will also enhance the trail's drainage performance. Constructing into the hillslope will facilitate more efficient overland sheet flow drainage. When the sheet flow runs down the cut bank in a thin film it accelerates, giving it the momentum to flow across the trail bed and down the hillslope. (See Photo 5.20.) Curvilinear alignment combined with sustainable linear grades, hillside construction, and outsloping prevents water diversion and accumulation. Retaining the landform's natural drainage patterns is the key to sustainable trails. 4. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 52 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #NQEU6U 5.7.6. Final Grade Reconciliation Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #JTLEZB: Once all major and minor control points are located within the trail corridor, the average and maximum sustainable linear grades between control points are identified. These grades can then be compared to the designed trail grade. If there are no conflicts, the trail alignment can be finalized. The final linear grade between each control point must be equal to or less than the maximum sustainable linear grade and the designed grade, which may require reconciling segments where the average linear grade exceeds these limits. Additional linear run can be obtained through topographical turns, climbing turns, or switchbacks. Engineered and constructed solutions may also be necessary to work through minor controls and reduce linear grades, which can require many days in the field. By completing this trail design process, the designer will gain a thorough knowledge of the landform and be aware of all the issues and proposed design solutions. By the end of field reconnaissance, the designer should have explored every possible routing and selected one that represents the best possible alignment. For pedestrian trails, the designer can now determine if the proposed alignment meets accessibility standards. By now, every option should have been explored to design and construct an accessible trail. 5. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 33 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #XSQ2CN 5.7.3. Maximum Sustainable Linear Grades #BRLU95 5.7.3.9. Evaluating and Interpreting the Criteria Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #76SGWC: Once the maximum linear grade has been identified between the major control points, it can be compared to the average linear grade determined by the rise over run calculation. If the average grade is steeper than the maximum sustainable grade, the trail alignment needs to be adjusted (lengthened) to conform to the grade limit. Using the above example of two control points that are 2,000 feet apart with a 200 foot elevation difference, if the maximum sustainable linear grade is determined to be 8% and the average linear grade between the two control points is 10%, then additional linear run must be provided to reduce the average linear grade. To determine the additional linear run needed, divide the elevation difference between the two controls by the maximum sustainable linear grade (i.e., 200 \text{ ft} \div 0.08 = 2,500 \text{ ft} ), then subtract the existing distance between the two points to determine the additional length needed (i.e., 2,500 \text{ ft} - 2,000 \text{ ft} = 500 \text{ ft} ). To reduce the average linear grade to 8%, an additional 500 lineal feet of trail must be added to the alignment. If landbase, resource, aesthetic, or construction issues prohibit lengthening the trail in a curvilinear fashion, then trail features and structures such as topographic turns, climbing turns, and switchbacks may be needed. Steps may also be a potential solution. These trail features and structures must be placed at appropriate locations and become minor control points. 6. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 36 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #9WNHGK 5.7.5. Field Reconnaissance #7JBFFE 5.7.5.1. Minor Control Point Identification Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #BQ5JNU: Often, these control points are obvious, though occasionally they are not, and careful observation of the landform is required. Conditions such as the presence of wetland obligate plants, pistol grip or tilted trees, ponding water, or old landslide rotations overgrown with vegetation indicate unstable or problematic terrain. These areas require additional investigation and thorough assessment by an appropriate specialist. All of these features are potential control points that may influence the trail alignment. Unique features such as view sheds, waterfalls, flowering plants, specimen trees, or access to water should also be considered minor control points that designers integrate into the alignment. 7. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 39 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #9WNHGK 5.7.5. Field Reconnaissance #XG25M6 5.7.5.2. Designed Control Points Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #NEWLSB: Designed control points are locations on the landform that call for a trail structure. Incorporating certain characteristics of the landform is essential to the successful performance of some trail structures, such as watercourse crossings and turns. Refer to Chapter 12, Topographic Turn , Climbing Turn , and Switchback Construction , Chapter 14, Drainage Structures , Chapter 16, Timber Planking , Puncheon , and Boardwalk Structures , and Chapter 17, Bridge Construction , for further information on selecting, designing, and constructing drainage structures. 8. Source: Principles of Trail Layout and Design (#LXV9AT), California State Parks, p. 29 Context: #HE95FY Chapter 5. Principles of Trail Layout and Design #EEPQMJ 5.7. Trail Layout #XSQ2CN 5.7.3. Maximum Sustainable Linear Grades Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #RCLS5L: Maximum sustainable linear grade is the linear grade of a trail that, when combined with proper layout and construction, will result in a trail bed that requires only routine maintenance and will not threaten resources, even when subjected to severe weather conditions or heavy use. All trails require some level of maintenance. However, a sustainable trail should perform its intended purpose without the need for non-cyclical maintenance and should not be subject to catastrophic failures during significant storm events. ### 59. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation Matching excerpt #RTLSM6: In this section, we describe how to generate a tensor field in the domain using our system. The approach is to edit tensor fields by specifying constraints such as regular and radial patterns, brush strokes, topography information, and rotation fields. While we borrow some vector and tensor field design techniques such as the use of basis fields and field smoothing from previous work [Zhang et al. 2006; Zhang et al. 2007; Chen et al. 2007], we contribute the application of the idea to street network modeling and introduce a novel brush interface that facilitates the specification of user constraints, the use of rotation fields to relax the orthogonality in a tensor field network, the combination of noise and tensor field design, hierarchical segmentation and editing, automatic incorporation of water and height maps in the generation of a tensor field, and the introduction of discontinuities. 2. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 0 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #LPYH4V Abstract Matching excerpt #G9R678: This paper addresses the problem of interactively modeling large street networks. We introduce an intuitive and flexible modeling framework in which a user can create a street network from scratch or modify an existing street network. This is achieved through designing an underlying tensor field and editing the graph representing the street network. The framework is intuitive because it uses tensor fields to guide the generation of a street network. The framework is flexible because it allows the user to combine various global and local modeling operations such as brush strokes, smoothing, constraints, noise and rotation fields. Our results will show street networks and three-dimensional urban geometry of high visual quality. 3. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 6 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #ZPVYV6 6 Street Graph Generation #AZZQZY 6.4 Local Street Graph Editing using Tensor Fields Matching excerpt #36WURJ: Our system allows the user to specify regions inside which the existing street network is erased and replaced with one that is created from a locally defined tensor field. Such an approach lends the power of tensor field design to graph editing. In our system, the user can explicitly specifies a region to modify or uses the brush interface that we discussed in Section 5 to obtain a region. 4. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #P35TFV 3 Pipeline Overview Matching excerpt #QCYCTQ: (2) that give rise to a major street network (3). Then the user refines the initial major road layout by placing a new tensor field design element inducing a radial structure in the tensor field (4) as well as the street graph (5). Using our segmentation algorithm, the user performs additional local tensor field modifications (6) and generate a minor road network (7). The user uses a rotation noise field to create irregular structures near the top (8) and produces the final result (9). The visualization of tensor fields shown in this paper is based on [van Wijk 2002; Zhang et al. 2007]. 5. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation #FCEMBJ 5.1 Generation of Basis Fields Matching excerpt #5P8T42: We allow the user to specify desired street network patterns (e.g., regular, radial, etc) at needed locations. Each of the specified constraints is converted into a basis tensor field defined over the whole domain. These fields are then blended using decaying radial basis functions, which allows desired patterns to be maintained at specified locations. To respect features in the topography maps, we also generate basis tensor fields that respect the boundaries of features such as the boundaries of rivers and lakes. Such basis tensor fields can then be combined with user-specified basis fields, which will respect both user constraints and natural boundaries. Next, we provide examples on how to compute the basis tensor fields based on the input. 6. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 1 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #P35TFV 3 Pipeline Overview Matching excerpt #P7VVVZ: Stage One allows the user to produce a tensor field using a range of design operations, such as combining individual basis fields, computing tensor fields from boundaries, using a brush stroke interface, and rotating the field with noise. These tools allow the user to iteratively refine the design (Section 5). During editing, the user can manipulate a tensor field T and three rotation fields R_1 , R_2 , and R_3 which we use to rotate the eigenvector directions. The computational domain is a regular 2D grid D with the values of the aforementioned field stored at the vertices. Bilinear interpolation is used to obtain values inside the cells of D . These data structures are also the input to the next stage. 7. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 3 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation #A8XR5R 5.2 Combination and Editing of Basis Fields Matching excerpt #RT3XZL: Combination of Basis Fields: The system allows the user to create and modify a tensor field by using design elements . A design element corresponds to a user-specified tensor field pattern, such as a grid or radial pattern, at a given location. Our implementation follows closely the tensor field design system of Zhang et al. [2007], in which every user specification is used to create a global basis tensor field. These basis fields are then summed using radial-basis functions (See Equation 3) such that the resulting tensor field satisfies the user specifications. 8. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 0 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #H9D7PX 1 Introduction Matching excerpt #A2NHD8: An important aspect of street patterns is the existence of two dominant directions due to the need for efficient use of space. Interestingly, tensor fields give rise to two sets of hyperstreamlines (defined in Section 4): one follows the major eigenvector field, and the other the minor eigenvector field. These observations have inspired our approach in which interactive tensor field design techniques are used to guide the road network generation. This concept is illustrated in Figures 1 and 3. The user can interactively edit a street network by either modifying the underlying tensor field or by changing the graph representing the street network. This allows for efficient modeling because we can combine global and local modeling operations, constraints, and procedural methods. Approximate matches 1. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 6 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #ZPVYV6 6 Street Graph Generation #AZZQZY 6.4 Local Street Graph Editing using Tensor Fields Score: 0.03 Related excerpt #36WURJ: Our system allows the user to specify regions inside which the existing street network is erased and replaced with one that is created from a locally defined tensor field. Such an approach lends the power of tensor field design to graph editing. In our system, the user can explicitly specifies a region to modify or uses the brush interface that we discussed in Section 5 to obtain a region. 2. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #RTLSM6: In this section, we describe how to generate a tensor field in the domain using our system. The approach is to edit tensor fields by specifying constraints such as regular and radial patterns, brush strokes, topography information, and rotation fields. While we borrow some vector and tensor field design techniques such as the use of basis fields and field smoothing from previous work [Zhang et al. 2006; Zhang et al. 2007; Chen et al. 2007], we contribute the application of the idea to street network modeling and introduce a novel brush interface that facilitates the specification of user constraints, the use of rotation fields to relax the orthogonality in a tensor field network, the combination of noise and tensor field design, hierarchical segmentation and editing, automatic incorporation of water and height maps in the generation of a tensor field, and the introduction of discontinuities. 3. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #P35TFV 3 Pipeline Overview Score: 0.028 Related excerpt #QCYCTQ: (2) that give rise to a major street network (3). Then the user refines the initial major road layout by placing a new tensor field design element inducing a radial structure in the tensor field (4) as well as the street graph (5). Using our segmentation algorithm, the user performs additional local tensor field modifications (6) and generate a minor road network (7). The user uses a rotation noise field to create irregular structures near the top (8) and produces the final result (9). The visualization of tensor fields shown in this paper is based on [van Wijk 2002; Zhang et al. 2007]. 4. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation #FCEMBJ 5.1 Generation of Basis Fields Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #6X3MNM: The tensor field is generated based on user constraints (desirable patterns) and topography information (water and park boundaries, terrain height, etc). Near the city center, the user may wish to create a typical North-South and East-West pattern. In contrast, near the coastline, it is often natural to design the road network to follow the coastline. To provide sufficient flexibility in addressing these different and often competing needs, we seek a tensor field design framework that allows both global and local control. 5. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 3 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation #A8XR5R 5.2 Combination and Editing of Basis Fields Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #UAHQYR: Brush Interface: We also use the idea of a brush-based interface, in which the user produces tensor values by moving the mouse to form a curve or loop. Then a region is found to have a pre-defined distance to the curve [Sethian 1996]. Finally, the tensor values inside this region are computed by treating the user-specified curve as the constraint. The brush-based interface therefore allows a tensor field to be created locally instead of globally. More importantly, if desired, the tensor field can become discontinuous along the boundary of the region. An example operation is illustrated in Figure 7. 6. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 0 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #LPYH4V Abstract Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #G9R678: This paper addresses the problem of interactively modeling large street networks. We introduce an intuitive and flexible modeling framework in which a user can create a street network from scratch or modify an existing street network. This is achieved through designing an underlying tensor field and editing the graph representing the street network. The framework is intuitive because it uses tensor fields to guide the generation of a street network. The framework is flexible because it allows the user to combine various global and local modeling operations such as brush strokes, smoothing, constraints, noise and rotation fields. Our results will show street networks and three-dimensional urban geometry of high visual quality. 7. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 0 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #H9D7PX 1 Introduction Score: 0.024 Related excerpt #A2NHD8: An important aspect of street patterns is the existence of two dominant directions due to the need for efficient use of space. Interestingly, tensor fields give rise to two sets of hyperstreamlines (defined in Section 4): one follows the major eigenvector field, and the other the minor eigenvector field. These observations have inspired our approach in which interactive tensor field design techniques are used to guide the road network generation. This concept is illustrated in Figures 1 and 3. The user can interactively edit a street network by either modifying the underlying tensor field or by changing the graph representing the street network. This allows for efficient modeling because we can combine global and local modeling operations, constraints, and procedural methods. 8. Source: Interactive procedural street modeling (#V4TQYB), Eugene Zhang, Gregory Esch, Guoning Chen, Pascal Müller, Peter Wonka, p. 2 Context: #57PDWB Interactive Procedural Street Modeling #QNKCB5 5 Tensor Field Generation #FCEMBJ 5.1 Generation of Basis Fields Score: 0.023 Related excerpt #5P8T42: We allow the user to specify desired street network patterns (e.g., regular, radial, etc) at needed locations. Each of the specified constraints is converted into a basis tensor field defined over the whole domain. These fields are then blended using decaying radial basis functions, which allows desired patterns to be maintained at specified locations. To respect features in the topography maps, we also generate basis tensor fields that respect the boundaries of features such as the boundaries of rivers and lakes. Such basis tensor fields can then be combined with user-specified basis fields, which will respect both user constraints and natural boundaries. Next, we provide examples on how to compute the basis tensor fields based on the input. ### 60. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #WBXNQF 3. Development of Beautimeter #ATX2HV 3.1 Design and Functionality Matching excerpt #DYBL86: The development of Beautimeter aimed to create a user-friendly tool powered by GPT that incorporates the theory of centers and the 15 fundamental properties of beauty. The design process began by defining the core functionality: enabling GPT to analyze two architectural and urban images and to determine which one embodies a higher degree of beauty based on these properties. This was achieved by translating the properties into a scoring system that GPT could effectively utilize. By leveraging GPT's advanced natural language processing capabilities, Beautimeter prompted users to present two images of our daily lives (direct image inputs), indicating which is more beautiful and providing the corresponding score for each image. 2. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #WBXNQF 3. Development of Beautimeter #9MKAB2 3.2 Implementation Matching excerpt #VYALTB: The implementation of Beautimeter faced virtually few challenges, demonstrating the powerful capabilities of GPT rather than the complexities of my research. As an expert in living structure theory, I can objectively assess the effectiveness of GPT in understanding the theory of centers and the 15 properties. We found that the natural language processing capabilities of GPT were inherently sufficient to reflect the nuances of the 15 properties. We tested the tool on a variety of images, including buildings and urban environments. Notably, despite our efforts to fine-tune the model, we discovered that GPT's out-of-the-box performance was already robust enough to meet our needs. 3. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 0 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #MAS64L Abstract: Matching excerpt #2U3JMH: Beautimeter is a new tool powered by generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technology, designed to evaluate architectural and urban beauty. Rooted in Christopher Alexander's theory of centers, this work builds on the idea that all environments possess, to varying degrees, an innate sense of life. Alexander identified 15 fundamental properties, such as levels of scale and thick boundaries, that characterize living structure, which Beautimeter uses as a basis for its analysis. By integrating GPT's advanced natural language processing capabilities, Beautimeter assesses the extent to which a structure embodies these 15 properties, enabling a nuanced evaluation of architectural and urban aesthetics. Using ChatGPT, the tool helps users generate insights into the perceived beauty and coherence of spaces. We conducted a series of case studies, evaluating images of architectural and urban environments, as well as carpets, paintings, and other artifacts. The results demonstrate Beautimeter's effectiveness in analyzing aesthetic qualities across diverse contexts. Our findings suggest that by leveraging GPT technology, Beautimeter offers architects, urban planners, and designers a powerful tool to create spaces that resonate deeply with people. This paper also explores the implications of such technology for architecture and urban design, highlighting its potential to enhance both the design process and the assessment of built environments. 4. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 8 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #63MN28 4. Case Studies for Verification #HW35C5 4.2 Results and Discussion Matching excerpt #FH8XCN: Beautimeter relies mainly on the 15 properties of living structure to automatically assess and score pairs of images in terms of their livingness thanks to the advance of GPT technology. While Beautimeter is largely relying on the number of the 15 properties, other methods gauge architectural and urban beauty in a more quantitative manner (e.g., Birkhoff 1933, Palmer et al. 2013). An example is based on the formula L = S * H , where L represents the livingness or perceived beauty of a structure, S represents the number of substructures, and H denotes their hierarchical levels. This formula, which is derived from previous work (Jiang and de Rijke 2023) offers an objective and mathematical way of assessing architectural and urban beauty by analyzing the structural and hierarchical properties of spaces. 5. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 6 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #63MN28 4. Case Studies for Verification #38B7RW 4.1 Experiments with Pairs of Images Matching excerpt #FKED3M: We investigated Beautimeter’s applicability by conducting a series of experiments that involved evaluating 46 pairs of images. The images were sourced from the Nature of Order Book 1 (Alexander 2002–2005) – specifically, Chapter 2 “Degrees of Life” (Figure 5) and Chapter 8 “The Mirror of the Self” (Figure 6) – which include buildings, city scenes, paintings, and artifacts. These experiments explored the living structure concept by asking GPT which image in each pair showed a stronger sense of beauty or life. In the original context, Alexander (2002–2005) provided a form of ground truth by suggesting that the left-hand image in each pair generally embodied more beauty or life than the right-hand image. Our experiment sought to test this hypothesis by scoring each image, based on the 15 properties, via Beautimeter. The aim was to quantify the seemingly subjective yet consistent nature of human perception regarding what constitutes a living structure. Beautimeter was presented pairs of images and asked to evaluate which one exhibited a higher degree of beauty or life. Beautimeter generated a score for each image based on the 15 properties. The scoring did not include any specific articulation or elaboration and instead focused solely on the overall perception of beauty, as informed by these properties. 6. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 1 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #3UVYQC 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #Z7F47P: New opportunities to address these challenges have arisen because of recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in natural language processing. Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technology, which is exemplified by tools such as ChatGPT (OpenAI et al., 2023), has shown exceptional ability to understand and generate human-like texts. These technologies excel at processing and analyzing large volumes of data, including both images and texts, which makes them ideal for tasks that demand personal and introspective assessments (e.g., Fu et al. 2023, Peng et al. 2023, Ramm et al. 2024). We have built on this potential to develop a novel tool called Beautimeter, which identifies and scores the presence of the 15 fundamental properties to evaluate the living structure within spaces. Beautimeter provides a systematic way to assess urban and architectural beauty by quantifying each property, enabling a broad and consistent evaluation of how well a space aligns with the principles of living structure. This approach offers profound insights into how individuals perceive and interact with built environments by grounding evaluations in the tangible presence of these key properties. Approximate matches 1. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #WBXNQF 3. Development of Beautimeter #ATX2HV 3.1 Design and Functionality Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #6RAE35: GPT processes the prompt and compares the images based on the encoded understanding of the 15 properties or the theory of centers in general and generates an overall beauty score for each image. The user interface (UI) of Beautimeter (Figure 4) was designed to be intuitive so that users could easily upload or capture any images and obtain results. The tool presents users with the comparison task, processes their input or two images, and then clearly and concisely displays the results (Figure 4). The UI also allows users to track their evaluations and compare results over time, thus offering a deeper understanding of how different spaces resonate with the principles of life-enhancing design. 2. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 6 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #63MN28 4. Case Studies for Verification #38B7RW 4.1 Experiments with Pairs of Images Score: 0.029 Related excerpt #FKED3M: We investigated Beautimeter’s applicability by conducting a series of experiments that involved evaluating 46 pairs of images. The images were sourced from the Nature of Order Book 1 (Alexander 2002–2005) – specifically, Chapter 2 “Degrees of Life” (Figure 5) and Chapter 8 “The Mirror of the Self” (Figure 6) – which include buildings, city scenes, paintings, and artifacts. These experiments explored the living structure concept by asking GPT which image in each pair showed a stronger sense of beauty or life. In the original context, Alexander (2002–2005) provided a form of ground truth by suggesting that the left-hand image in each pair generally embodied more beauty or life than the right-hand image. Our experiment sought to test this hypothesis by scoring each image, based on the 15 properties, via Beautimeter. The aim was to quantify the seemingly subjective yet consistent nature of human perception regarding what constitutes a living structure. Beautimeter was presented pairs of images and asked to evaluate which one exhibited a higher degree of beauty or life. Beautimeter generated a score for each image based on the 15 properties. The scoring did not include any specific articulation or elaboration and instead focused solely on the overall perception of beauty, as informed by these properties. 3. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 6 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #63MN28 4. Case Studies for Verification #HW35C5 4.2 Results and Discussion Score: 0.027 Related excerpt #94WVC5: Tables 2 and 3 summarize the results of the experiments. The tables quantify the degree of beauty, as perceived through the lens of the 15 properties, which provides insights into the concept of living structure. Table 2 displays the scores for the image pairs from Figure 5, with the left- and right-hand images scored separately. Alexander proposed that the left-hand-side images generally possess more beauty or life than those on the right, yet the yellow-highlighted results in the table show instances where the right-hand-side images received higher scores than those on the left. Table 3 quantifies the results of the image pairs from Figure 6, and there are again cases where images on the right were rated higher than those on the left by Beautimeter (again highlighted in yellow). The deviations shown in these two tables underline the complexities involved in applying the 15 properties to diverse visual contexts, revealing the power but also limitations of GPT when evaluating beauty or life across different types of images. 4. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 8 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #63MN28 4. Case Studies for Verification #HW35C5 4.2 Results and Discussion Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #FH8XCN: Beautimeter relies mainly on the 15 properties of living structure to automatically assess and score pairs of images in terms of their livingness thanks to the advance of GPT technology. While Beautimeter is largely relying on the number of the 15 properties, other methods gauge architectural and urban beauty in a more quantitative manner (e.g., Birkhoff 1933, Palmer et al. 2013). An example is based on the formula L = S * H , where L represents the livingness or perceived beauty of a structure, S represents the number of substructures, and H denotes their hierarchical levels. This formula, which is derived from previous work (Jiang and de Rijke 2023) offers an objective and mathematical way of assessing architectural and urban beauty by analyzing the structural and hierarchical properties of spaces. 5. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #WBXNQF 3. Development of Beautimeter #ATX2HV 3.1 Design and Functionality Score: 0.026 Related excerpt #DYBL86: The development of Beautimeter aimed to create a user-friendly tool powered by GPT that incorporates the theory of centers and the 15 fundamental properties of beauty. The design process began by defining the core functionality: enabling GPT to analyze two architectural and urban images and to determine which one embodies a higher degree of beauty based on these properties. This was achieved by translating the properties into a scoring system that GPT could effectively utilize. By leveraging GPT's advanced natural language processing capabilities, Beautimeter prompted users to present two images of our daily lives (direct image inputs), indicating which is more beautiful and providing the corresponding score for each image. 6. Source: Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty Based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure (#MH5J8D), Bin Jiang, p. 5 Context: #HAZYNL Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure #WBXNQF 3. Development of Beautimeter #9MKAB2 3.2 Implementation Score: 0.025 Related excerpt #VYALTB: The implementation of Beautimeter faced virtually few challenges, demonstrating the powerful capabilities of GPT rather than the complexities of my research. As an expert in living structure theory, I can objectively assess the effectiveness of GPT in understanding the theory of centers and the 15 properties. We found that the natural language processing capabilities of GPT were inherently sufficient to reflect the nuances of the 15 properties. We tested the tool on a variety of images, including buildings and urban environments. Notably, despite our efforts to fine-tune the model, we discovered that GPT's out-of-the-box performance was already robust enough to meet our needs. ### 61. Assistant Here are some of the most vivid, surprising, or simply lovely details I found. ## From the village paper 1. **A church exerts a kind of computational gravity.** The model has a “worship” interest function: houses can be attracted toward churches, temples, statues, or monasteries, reflecting their historical role as settlement centers (#N9CNZB). It is a small but evocative example of turning cultural meaning into spatial force. 2. **The village can change personality during its own history.** A growth scenario might begin with a defensive village type during wartime and later switch to a prosperous farming type. The final settlement therefore contains the spatial residue of two different social periods (#4VZ57G). This is much richer than selecting a single visual “village style.” 3. **Existing roads are made almost free to travel along.** When connecting a new building, the algorithm heavily discounts the cost of reusing an existing road. That one decision causes separate routes to bundle into a recognizable network rather than producing a starburst of independent paths (#RVMFRF). 4. **Road cycles are deliberately added as shortcuts.** After connecting a building, the system looks through a cone in the road’s forward direction for another nearby road. If it finds one at a suitable angle, it adds a second connection and creates a loop (#JF9DFL). The loop is not decorative; it emerges as a plausible shortcut. 5. **Corners are treated as questions of ownership.** When two parcels meet at a road junction, naive growth creates implausible sharp wedges. The algorithm resolves this by letting the parcel that reached the junction first annex the corner. If another building consequently loses road access, that building is removed (#SWN7G2). A geometric cleanup rule quietly becomes a story about access and property. 6. **Parcel geometry contains an implicit reading of the land.** Farms use Euclidean growth, while houses and villas use a different distance measure to encourage nearly quadrilateral plots. Water, roads, and walls have infinite crossing cost, and steep slopes resist parcel expansion (#BL7KZ7, #NV2SQZ, #DZABMM). 7. **Windows and doors are allowed to fail.** The open shape grammar first attempts the preferred window or door. If it collides with the ground, it searches nearby positions; if those fail, it tries a different shape; if every attempt fails, it simply abandons the element (#3UURQM, #BGRWGE). That willingness not to complete a rule is what allows the architecture to adapt to difficult terrain. 8. **The parcel validation numbers are almost uncannily close.** Generated parcels averaged **2.873 neighbors**, versus **2.812** in the real village data; generated contours averaged **4.29 edges**, versus **4.068** in reality (#TERPPP). It is a modest comparison, but unusually concrete for a procedural-settlement paper. 9. **The apparent organic simplicity hides a large machine.** Parcel propagation ran on a $4096\times4096$ grid, and each village type required roughly **150 parameters** (#58TDXE, #EYJ8SX). The results look naturally evolved, but producing that naturalness involved substantial invisible calibration. ## Paths, roads, and terrain 10. **A trail is a conversation between people who never meet.** A walker prefers an existing trail but creates a shortcut when its detour becomes excessive. The resulting path changes what later walkers do, so past and present users interact through the altered ground (#JN4H6B). The path itself is the communication medium. 11. **Uphill and downhill walkers need one another to make good zigzags.** In the mountain-trail model, downhill walkers are strongly constrained by safe descent angles and generate zigzag tendencies, but their traces remain diffuse. Uphill walkers—with different movement constraints—are attracted to and reinforce those traces, producing a clear shared trail (#S2VCY4). 12. **The best trail is described as “hydrologically invisible.”** The California trail handbook says a well-aligned path should dip into and pull back out of even subtle swales, remaining nearly perpendicular to sheet runoff. Done correctly, it does not capture water or become an accidental stream channel (#EZ5S8W, #G9NCTS). That is a beautiful design criterion: the trail is visible to people but almost invisible to the watershed. 13. **A small change in acceptable slope can add a great deal of path.** The handbook’s example has two points 2,000 feet apart with 200 feet of elevation difference—a 10% grade. Reducing that to a sustainable 8% requires a 2,500-foot route, so the trail must acquire an additional **500 feet** of curves, turns, or switchbacks (#76SGWC). The characteristic beauty of a winding trail can be a direct consequence of arithmetic. 14. **Street networks can be painted as invisible directional fields.** The interactive street-modeling paper lets a designer brush tensor fields over terrain. Grid, radial, noisy, and rotated patterns are blended, while rivers, lakes, and topography bend the resulting streets (#RTLSM6, #5P8T42). The roads are generated by following directions in a field the designer never sees in the finished city. 15. **Some terrain systems draw the rivers first and invent the mountains afterward.** Instead of making a terrain and searching it for drainage, the hydrology-based generator starts with a hierarchical river network, derives watersheds and river types, and then blends and carves terrain around it (#7CSK9U). It reverses the usual intuition: the river is not placed in the valley; the valley is constructed as an explanation of the river. 16. **Geological time becomes a design slider.** The analytical erosion method avoids stepping through thousands of simulated intervals. It solves for the terrain at a selected age, allowing a designer to move through erosion time interactively without increasing computation time (#CEANXB). ## Human meaning in topography 17. **The highest summit was not always the sacred one.** Some Minoan peak sanctuaries occupied a lower summit because that point directly overlooked—and appeared most prominent from—the settlement below. What mattered was not absolute altitude but reciprocal visibility between community and shrine (#QPEZUU). 18. **The sanctuaries may have formed a fire-lit network.** From some sanctuaries, six others were visible. Because the sites contain thick ash layers from ceremonial fires, Peatfield imagines them as a network of sacred beacons uniting regions during a festival night (#GDV37F, #JAHVNN). It is a striking example of architecture consisting partly of sightlines and synchronized light. 19. **Abandoned ritual sites may record settlement decline rather than religious decline.** The contraction in peak sanctuaries after LM I closely follows the abandonment of nearby settlements. The cult may not have collapsed independently; the local communities that sustained the sites disappeared (#JPQH23). 20. **A floodplain can remember an industry for centuries.** After mining, logging, or intensive farming sends enormous sediment loads downstream, a river may aggrade and later incise back toward its earlier level. Yet thick terraces of anthropogenic sediment remain and continue entering the river long afterward (#3YVSD7, #5KWFJP). The disturbance ends socially before it ends geomorphically. ## Beautiful or provocative computational ideas 21. **A neighborhood code is compared to a cake recipe or surgical procedure.** Alexander and colleagues argue that specifying the right ingredients is insufficient: order matters. The same geometric elements introduced in the wrong sequence may not produce a living neighborhood, just as cake ingredients mixed in the wrong order do not produce the same cake (#KZ8VHA). Their “code” specifies an unfolding rather than a final plan (#44KMMZ). 22. **Wholeness is modeled with PageRank.** Jiang represents spatial centers as nodes in a directed graph and gives greater “life” to centers supported by other strong centers—the same recursive logic used to rank web pages. The depth of the resulting hierarchy becomes a measure of the whole’s livingness (#EHDJCS). It is an unexpectedly literal bridge between Alexander and search-engine mathematics. 23. **One beauty metric ranks Pollock above Leonardo.** The structural-beauty paper defines livingness through the number of substructures and the depth of their hierarchy. In its experiments, Jackson Pollock’s *Blue Poles* scores as more structurally beautiful than the *Mona Lisa* (#2XX4AM). Whether convincing or not, it exposes how radically different “structural beauty” is from conventional taste. 24. **The newer GPT Beautimeter is tested against Alexander’s own judgments.** GPT scored 46 pairs of buildings, city scenes, paintings, and artifacts according to Alexander’s fifteen properties (#FKED3M). It sometimes preferred the image Alexander considered less alive, which the paper acknowledges as evidence of the difficulty—and limits—of automating judgments of wholeness (#94WVC5). 25. **Some of the most convincing water in the corpus is not simulated water.** Procedural Riverscapes places looping primitives for waves, whirlpools, and cascades, blends them into a hierarchical function, and evaluates the surface directly without fluid simulation (#QH5ARN). It preserves the characteristic events by which we recognize a river rather than reproducing every molecule. The detail I find most beautiful across all of them is the idea that **good form often comes from tactful refusal**: a road reuses an older road instead of cutting a new one; a trail bends rather than becoming a stream; a shrine chooses visibility over height; a window moves—or is omitted—rather than violating the ground; and a new structure strengthens what is already latent instead of replacing it.