Comment by joaorj

No, only very specific videos, like this particular one. The art is in finding a pretty video that you can render in 4kb, not making a pretty video and then reducing it to 4kb. The latter would most likely be impossible.

"39. Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."

It's the pigeonhole principle; there are only a few long videos possibly encodable as short programs because there are only a few short programs in the first place. To get compression performance, one has to target an ever smaller subset of possible videos, which eventually starts becoming an AI-complete problem.

The difference between procedural generation and a video is similar to the difference between raster and vector graphics. Demoscene intros like this are more like your computer giving a live performance from scratch than playing a movie. Ideas like video compression don't really apply. They create 3D models and textures from simple math functions and filters, make a world from them, add more math functions for camera movements, and play some synthesized music that's more akin to MIDI than MP3 (to put it simply).

I recently began making a function that can output the 2D lines of the walls of a house, with windows and different shapes (L, S, T), and inside walls that are generated with points and NESW directions. It was pretty fun and challenging, but now I have to move to 3D to make this base line become a level with windows and door.

The only thing I have to give this function, is the height/width ratio, some other ratio that define how large "corner holes" are in the LST configuration, the amount and relative position of windows and door, the starting point and NSEW direction for inside walls, and with all that, I could create a house of a story building with an inside. Of course it's not finished yet, and there isn't furniture of details, but you see that in theory, you can use procedural generation as a compression tool for human-designed structures, that no machine learning algorithm or autoencoder could really achieve.

If you associate this kind of algorithm into a well made openstreetmap database (think vector tiles which are used for GPS software), you could also recreate the whole world in 3D, with enough details to make a game that would not require that much disk memory. Recreating the roads, fences, parks, rivers, vegetation, elevation etc is difficult because it require a lot of tuning and geometry tricks, but it's very cheap in term of cpu cycle and disk.

The folks at outerra have begun making an actual software that lets you browse the entire planet in 3D. You can zoom in real time from space to 1cm. They don't have cities yet though, but they are planning for it. I want to make a game using such ambitious ideas, but it's not easy...

Look up algorithmic information theory. To use a poor analogy, it is to procedural generation what information theory is to compression.

No, only very specific videos, like this particular one.