This Needed To Happen

Jonathan Aldrich, software engineer, New Yorker, Nintendo music and '00s Mario RPG enthusiast. jdaster64's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jdaster64

[objectdreams]

recipe for greased casserole with slices of lemon juice

written using a predictive text interface

source: The American Woman’s Cookbook (1938)

[nintendotreehouse]

Kirby Star Allies Patch - Part I: Rick & Kine & Coo!

Yo! Rob W. from Nintendo Treehouse here to give you a sneak peek at the upcoming Kirby Star Allies patch that launches on March 28th. As many of you may know, some legacy characters from past Kirby titles are being added as Dream Friends, fully playable characters, each with their own unique sets of moves that are taken from games they appeared in. 

In this series of posts, I’ll be providing some insight into each of these characters, their history, and their moves in Kirby Star Allies. Let’s get right to it by going over the history of the first character! 

…Errrrr, characters.

Keep reading

[quesogr7]

You know who else is excited about Inkling in Smash Bros?

[torkart]

Doodles from the stream I had tonight! I’ve started streaming on Twitch now, so if you’re interested in watching these in the future, head over here to follow me!

[suppermariobroth]

In Super Mario World, Banzai Bills will not harm Mario as long as he is riding Yoshi and his head is below the vertical center of the Banzai Bill. (Footage recorded by me from a SNES emulator.)

[mfanjul]

Starter Pachirisus! Grass, Fire and Water Dedicated to @jdaster64 :)

[kirbymusicoftheday]

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[kirbymusicoftheday]

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Music that plays during the credits of Kirby: Planet Robobot.

[kirbymusicoftheday]

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More music from Nutty Noon.

[aiweirdness]

Star Wars planet names generated by neural network

Neural networks are a kind of machine learning computer program that are very, very good at making their own internal rules about a dataset. If you give them a list of ANYTHING, they’ll figure out how to generate more stuff like it.

This makes neural networks very good at naming things - they can figure out what letter combinations and sounds make a word sound like a name for a kitten, or a paint color, or a Pokemon, or a D&D spell, or a guinea pig, or a metal band, or even a scary guinea pig.

There are almost 3,500 exoplanets confirmed to date and thousands more candidates waiting for confirmation, all with names like “Kepler-452b” and “55 Cnc-c” and “2MASS J01225093-2439505b”. Clearly, these names are not going to work if we have to one day shout them to the ship’s engineer during a raging ion storm.

Fortunately for the future of space travel, blog reader Chris Jones has sent me a list of almost 700 Star Wars planets. And in short order, the neural network was producing this:

Bartan Cenron Nalarar Bondal Ballor Van-Karal Valtane Vantos Malalas Mateot Tiris Kanan Montaan Tardor Nananon Moridia Tatloor

This is unedited output directly from the neural network, and I had to check to make sure that none of these names were in the original list - they’re just that plausible.

At a higher creativity (more random) setting, the names are a bit less pronounceable on average, but still could pass for Star Wars planets:

La Vok Slorru G Sakani Vaszalu Varkena Baro IV Toran Hatnlant Uluunna Baroa Tina Duperda Bantak Barkaan Ban Beraou Baxuor Rrarar

That’s not to say there weren’t strange results. 

Birdanan Boldura Balmara Barmen Garden Carton Loner Robes Sara Loon Laser Bunlalavor Bal Panda

This stems partly from the fact that the neural network has no idea what English words are - all it knows is Star Wars planet names, and so sometimes it ventures unknowingly into territory where the English language has gone before. There aren’t nearly as many of these accidental words as in other datasets, perhaps partly because these planets were designed to NOT sound like English.

I wanted to learn more about some of these planets, so I turned to two procedural programs. Unlike neural networks, in procedural generators human programmers make the rules rather than the neural network inventing its own. The only outputs you’ll get are those that the human programmer thought of building in, but this can still produce a huge range of interesting results.

I used the Twitter bot @I_find_planets by Charles Bergquist to generate descriptions of the planets, and the procedural planet generator by wwwtyro to generate the pictures.

Will we ever run out of neural network planet names? Sure, because there’s only a limited number of ways that characters can be combined into words before we’re back to indistinguishable mishmashes of letters and numbers. But in the meantime, the neural network could help us make our solar neighborhood a more pronounceable place.

[torkart]

Hyped for some KIRBY SWITCH!! Welcome back, Helpers!!

[blue-darner]

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so majestic…

[kirbymusicoftheday]

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In Tempest Towers the wind gusts left and right which can help or hinder Kirby and he climbs his way to the top.

[peardian]

Both Kirby and Super Mario RPG are still stuck in my mind right now, so have some more pre-rendered sprites! These four little critters are my earliest attempts at rendering sprites, dating all the way back from November of 2009. In order to make these, I had to enhance their original Kirby 64 models with proper 3D meshes. The game uses flat shading on enemies to hide the fact that most of them are made of intersecting planes. For those of you not familiar with the enemies of Kirby 64, their names are Punc, Galbo, Cairn, and N-Z.

[aiweirdness]

New paint colors invented by neural network

So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?

For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?

One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.

By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.

By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.

Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.

…oh, okay.

Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey:

Although not reliably.

In fact, looking at the neural network’s output as a whole, it is evident that:

The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey.

The neural network has really really bad ideas for paint names.

[peardian]

Topmaniac and the Topman tribe have taken over Battlerock Galaxy!

I figured I would post this after seeing how popular SMRPG-styled Heavy Mole was. These were made back in 2011, well before I even started on my Yaridovich model, using the assets from Super Mario Galaxy. It was still fun to recreate the game’s quirky animation style, even if the animations I created would probably require more tiles than the game allows. I made a full range of animations for each of them, so I am only showing my favorite for each character.

Regarding the backgrounds, I felt it would be more recognizable to use the original reflection textures on the UFOs than having it be a matte gray, even if that would be more accurate to the Super Mario RPG style. The stars and space rocks were put together by me in 8x8 tiles, even leaving blank spaces in the tiles occupied by the UFOs themselves. I made another tile featuring the yellow metal platform featured in the stage, but it isn’t as fun to look at.

[kirbymusicoftheday]

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Stage music from Grass Land.