Advanced platform game level generation using Neural Nets

Basically what I want is to generate a platform game from a very limited black and white tile set, then do a pix2pix or style-transfer generation and have something similar to this as a result..

from an input like this:

Generating the Black and White image

I first made an algorithm to generate the maze, there is many out there. This is a normal tilebased platform game type map. Then I made an algorithm that generates the lines that break up the boring blocks, but basically keep the same shape. It makes the level look a bit techno and at least a bit more interesting and hides the fact that it is a tile-based level.. This was a bit harder, but I think it's still pretty basic, so I'll let you figure that one out yourself. The new thing is how I got to use deeplearning, using all the great libraries out there like deeplearn.js and p5.

Creating the environment

I drew the first image myself, using neural nets to generate and machine-parts for this sci-fi type game from the original black and white image. The technique used is often called a style-transfer and is based on google's original deep-dream algorithm.
I used pictures of the insides of whatches and a basic machine-texture that I found after some experimenting. It basically turns ANYTHING into a machine.
Having a tile as a base gives a certain predictability to both level-topology and the thinnest possible lines (or smallest details in the final image)
I got a lot of different outputs:

Then by incepting these images and using them (or mixed versions of them) as inputs for yet another style transfer I got some even weirder, less mechanical looking ones..

Then I used photoshop to mix all nice input together. 

So that image is part Photoshop and part Neural net..

Rendering in sections of 256x256

I kind of see this as an environment. Or an athmospere. You could draw the same input in many ways, to get the different environments needed in a typical gamemap.
For now, I limit myself to one environment. Once I have this to my liking in photoshop I export the styled level. And I do a style transfer to the next section. Pix2Pix can only do small pictures well, so I limit myself to 256x256 sections..

Even though this is better than I ever expected (giving as I lowered the size of the test file even further for speed), the sections don't exacty line up and you get a little line in between. The answer to this is to render a section inbetween..

This section doesn't really line up with the other two sections, but it allows me to fade out the edges and create a seamless huge map.

Also this will in future make it possible to blend styles together seamlessly. (I hope)
Thought I'd share how I'm trying to make even better game-art with NeuralNets.

Memory conservation

Now all this can be done automatically in the browser of the player, making the map that needs to be transfered to the player an ordinary tilemap, which could even be compressed as a gif.
I see MANY advantages in this technique.

Wait until you see, the white of their eyes..

Ok, I've been waiting for the right moment to start buying bitcoin again. Buy the dip, right?

But that only works well, if you know when the dip ends..
Is the end of the fall here yet..?
I told myself when it was at 16.000,- euro's, that I'd start buying again when it hit 8000,- euro's. (or 50%) But it didn't feel right. So I didn't..
That moment has long gone, but now I was a bit at a loss..
So I took my original projection from 20-11-2017

and put the most recent course on that (purple line below in the next paragraph). As you may remember, I started warning for a crash, the moment we hit that green line on top. We went way further through than I could imagine, and so I think we will see at least very close to a maximum dip right now. But what is the maximum dip (or minimum) and when will it be?

Where and when will the minimum be?

I still think the minimum will be at the moment we hit the red line. (yellow line projects current drop to that point) We may go a bit deeper, because the high was so high and the ensuing panic may have scared a lot of people of or poisoned them against the concept of de-centralised (non-fiat) currencies and transactions (not blockchain or DAG/tangles per se, which most people can agree upon is a good thing).
We might also see some more regulation, which will probably scare people of.
But the moment to start buying according to my original predictions would be:
at 4610,- euro's which will occur at 19/02/2018 at 19:00 hours ( :) ). That is WAY to precise to be learned from such a graph, but I might be exactly right, how cool would that be?

But.... to be honest... I have the feeling the low will be later and lower than I first predicted, because the high was so much later and higher than I predicted..

I've decided to wait it out at least until 19/02/2018 OR 4610,- euro's, whichever comes first.
I think 4600,- euro's must be possible considering how enormous the positive spike was and anyway it's easier to remember than 4610.

Is that enough margin for error?

It went 6000,- euro's over my maximum. Which at that point was 60% more than I ever expected.
Well 60% less than expected would be 40% of 4600,- so: 1840,- euro... Jaaaaiks.

Yes, I'll definitely hold of.. Maybe my dream of holding one complete bitcoin again will come to pass (again).

Winklevoss Twins prediction

The winklevoss Twins made an outrageous prediction (or so people say)..
If anyone is still interested, if my original projections were correct, the Winklevoss twins will see their prediction of 320.000,- dollar, or about 260.000,- euro's by 1/10/2019 according to my schedule.
Wouldn't that be amazing! But since they said by 2020, it seems I'm even a bit more positive than they are. However, they advice you to buy now.. I'm not there yet.

Anything you put in at 1840,- (somewhere around 01/04/2018 if the present fall continues) will then be at 14100% profit by 2020.

A quick comparison..
So buying at 1840,- for 100,- euro will give you 14.100,- euro by 2020
at 4600,- it will be a 5600% profit (100,- -> 5.600,- euro)
and at 3700% profit if you buy NOW at 7000,-. (100,- -> 3.700,- euro)
This is presuming fiat-currencies haven't crashed by 2020.. The buying power of 14.100 euro might be not much different from 1000,- euro now.. (Yes, I said that!)

Yeah.. I'm gonna mostly wait it out...  maybe buy a bit.. to spread my risks.
Especially because the fees are still very high, which makes it stands to reason to buy all you want to buy in one go at the lowest point.
It's just hard to find that lowest point. But I was remarkably accurate in my predictions so far.. (only off by 60%, haha)
Hope this helps you decide a bit what you want to do with cryptocurrency.

I.C.O. Byteball

I bought some byteball. Not much. Toe in the water.

Even though the system byteball uses is wildly different from the blockchain, it still follows the bitCoin course rather closely. Way more closely than I hoped, I made some profit but it's really small. It kind of strengthens my idea that I.C.O's are not for me..

Classic Bubble

I don't know if you saw this graph:

it's from the financial times of last year.. from when bitCoin was around 5000 dollars.
It didn't turn out to be right. I don't think they took into account, bitCoin has been acting normally only on log-paper..But maybe there is still something we can learn?

Looking at the classic bubble, this is basically what I'm talking about. I think the blue line (in my graph) is the median (the dotted line in this graph), only it's still exponential.
The rest is pretty standard. But look at what happens AFTER the 'Despair' period... It rises again and pretty steeply. In fact, if you look at previous bubbles, we see a lot of companies went on to make a LOT of profit. (Of course a lot of them never got out of the despair phase and died, which is what happens when that line hits 0..)
But I think there is a hard core community for bitCoin, which won't ever allow it to go below 500,- , no matter what happens. Those are the idealists and they carried the coin for 5 years already, they don't scare easily... So going to 0 isn't really an option I.M.O..

So if I'm right, the whole question is WHERE in the despair period are we.. And I'm betting we just started it.
But let's see what happens between now and 19/02/2018 or even april 2018, which is, unless amazing things happen in the meantime, when I hope to post about bitCoin again, telling you I just bought at 1800,- :).

Bitonic is wel erg positief.

Hier boven
zie je het verschil in interpretatie tussen bitcoin.nl en bitcoinspot.nl.
Bitcoinspot spreekt van 1141 euro daling, bitcoin.nl van 893 euro stijging.
Als ik de grafiek zo zie, ben ik het eens met bitcoinspot..

BITCOIN, PICK YOUR PREDICTION..

Predictions are tricky business.

So, I'm going to let you do the hard work..

There seem to be two opinions..

BITCOIN WILL SOAR, like this...

...and reach $1.000.000 somewhere in 2023. If you look at the graph of the ALL time course up to now, this seems quite reasonable, even if it is about the same time that bitCoin has been on the market, that it has to survive. Maybe the future market WILL stabilise the bitCoin and is will follow a straight line (on log-paper, that is) to that million ..

or like this....

Wait, what? It could also grow to a million in just 3 years? Well yeah, this looks just as convincing, but that's kind of the problem.. What do and what don't you take into account.

I just made these two graphs, to show you both can be convincing. I don't know what's going to happen. No one does.. So WHY do so many people say...

BITCOIN WILL CRASH...

...and will drop to less than 1 dollar bij 2020? (Or even faster). This is what a bubble would be, they say.. But this is discontinuous and I'd say the burden of proof lies with someone expecting something discontinous to happen.. Looking in logarithmic space, bitcoin has been pretty consistent even with potentially catastrophic events, like the mtGox hacking or a recent ban in China. 

What event could spark this downfall? What could be big enough?
There are plenty of candidates, the trouble around bitfinex seems to be the latest fad. All these things are showing in the price, but it's always kept going..
Also if you look at the historic data of bitCoin, you see quite a few crashes.. Bitcoin dropping to a quarter of it's former price in a matter of days. Now some will say, we are waiting for a disaster, but every time up to now, they were proven wrong. This has happened 3/4 times allready.

BITCOIN WILL DIVERSIFY..

Obviously both predictions are a bit short sighted.. So we might need a new model...

I stated earlier that there is some logic to bitCoins exponential growth, because the marketing is similar to that of a social Media platform. So maybe we should look at those platforms.. Like Facebook.

Looking at this historic data of photo's shared on Facebook. Facebook's inital run was exponential, up until 2011. Then it started growing at a much slower rate. But something else happened. Facebook started buying other brands and expanding its own technology to share photo's. And if you look at the growth of that blue/green stack, it's still exponential..

I think something similar will happen to bitCoin. There will be platforms that build on bitCoin, like LiteCoin, there will be new technology, like ByteBall/IOTA's DAG and bitCoin itself will improve.

Hodling will bring you some of the profits, but not all. We have to keep on the lookout for something better. 

The king is dead, long live the king...

And then there are the believers, who say that after a bubble pops, the future still looks bright.. 

Look at internet they will say.. It crashed (dotcom-bubble), but after that, it continued growing at a more reasonable rate..

Google Trends

Maybe, when we look at the interest in bitCoin on google Trends we can get some insights.. It seems interest was growing exponentially and then in december suddenly cooled a lot.. Still this did not result in much of a pricedrop. (Even if I hoped it would..) 

Really, I don't know any more.. Just pick your own future..

15.000 euro, geen probleem

Op het moment van schrijven is de gemiddeld bitcoinkoers 14943.90 dat is geheel tegen mijn voorspellingen in. Hetgeen maar weer laat zien, dat ik er ook niks vanaf weet :)

Bij www.bitcoin.nl hebben ze een leuke graph (en veel extra info!), maar let wel op: ze ronden stevig af, waardoor de koers minder volatiel lijkt.

Op deze site:
https://99bitcoins.com/price-chart-history/
kun je de volgende kaart zien:

Ik ben dus niet de enige, die de conclusie trok, dat we moesten kijken naar exponentiele functies. Dit is de GEHELE koers, dus over 6 jaar. Vanaf het eerste moment dat er bitcoins verkocht konden worden, uitgezet op logaritmische schaal. Kijk maar naar de schaal: 0.01, 1,100,10.000,-
Daarop zou een exponentieel verloop een rechte lijn moeten zijn.
Dat is het niet helemaal, er zijn uitschieters, maar grappig genoeg is onze huidige uitschieter vrijwel onzichtbaar...
Dit komt, omdat het volgende streepje 1.000.000,- is!
Volgens deze grafiek zou de bitCoin dat over een jaar of 4/5 kunnen bereiken. Ongelooflijk, maar als je het op deze schaal bekijkt, verdwijnt de bobbel waar ik me zo'n zorgen over maakte..
Het is een herstel van de oude koers op langere termijn.

Dus... wellicht toch geen bitCoin Crash??? Keek ik naar niet genoeg data?
Ik ga toch maar weer voorzichtig wat bitcoins kopen, ondanks de aankomende futures-beurs morgen.. want ook al koop ik maar 0.02, als hij straks een miljoen waard is, is dat toch weer 20.000,- en dan wil ik ook wel 'hodl'en.

Zo en nu maar hopen, dat hij vandaag nog door de 15.000,- euro gaat :)
De amerikanen zitten natuurlijk op de 20.000,- dollar (nu op 17784) te wachten, maar ik hou het voorlopig op eigen bodem.

Ok, what's going on?

Ok, ik had het FOUT. Nog geen bitcoinCrash.

Maar ik hoop dat jullie met me eens zijn, dat dit geen gezonde groei meer is. Er is iets heel geks aan de hand en ik vertrouw het niet.
Dat gezegd hebbende, heb ik toch weer wat in bitCoin gestopt, niet veel, maar dit wil ik meemaken.
Een week geeft je nu 30% groei van je kapitaal.

Wel oppassen, de 10e wordt de futures markt voor Bitcoin geopend. Dan kunnen mensen geld verdienen aan een dalende koers. De conspiracy-theoretici denken dat deze laatste absurde groei komt door malefide praktijken, bekend als het masseren van de markt (alvorens je de boel laat knappen). Ik sluit het niet uit.
We gaan het zien. Ik laat wat er nu inzit lekker zitten. Wie weet wat er gebeurd.
Maar het is eigenlijk tegen beter weten in.

Hij schiet zo snel omhoog, dat ik er geen ruimte voor had gehouden in mijn toch wel HEEL ruime grafiek. En sneller dan mijn snelst geprojecteerde koers.
Ik blijf het gevoel hebben dat we nu binnenkort keihard gaan dalen, misschien wel weer tot de 5500,-

BitCoin Crash, any moment now. Wait for it...

Any moment now..

The bright green line encompasses all peaks over the last year. The red line is derived from all lows, given an exponential growth with a slightly different exponent. The blue line is the averaged exponent. It's not a hard formula, but I think it speaks for itself. bitCoin has behaved quite consistently the last year or so.

The dark green line is the exchange rate from when I made this prediction (see previous post). (The prize of bitCoin is in Euro's), the dark yellow line is what happened since then. It's grown more than exponentially or the exponent changed temporarily. That's usually followed by a quick correction to the blue line or below to the lower RED line!

We have seen crashes in the prize of bitCoin every time that green line was hit over the last two years.. And a few times when it was just getting too close.
01/04/2017 it even went down all the way to the red line.. This would mean a value of 3800,- at present time.

Buy again in 2018 or when it reaches 8000,- euro

I still believe..
Everytime the bitcoin has recovered. But as of this moment, I no longer have any bitCoin.
It reached my green line.. I'm waiting for the red line to happen.
And I plan to start buying again at 8000,- euro (9 498,05 dollars) while it's going down somewhere into the new year.

The last time we went OVER the line bitcoin lost a third of it's value in the space of a week. Let's hope that doesn't happen that quick this time. Because people are going to lose their money.

I might be TOTALLY wrong..
All I'm saying is: just don't put all your money in bitCoin JUST NOW!

I'm a blockchain believer, I'm even a bitCoin believer, (not an altcoin believer though, not in the long run...) Please be carefull.

I posted in English, makes it easier to share.

Voor de hollanders: ik heb het even in het Engels gedaan. Dit kon wel eens belangrijk zijn voor iedereen en dat maakt het makkelijker om te delen.