[danwills]

It sounds like there's more than one sense of what "procedural generation" means - to me it means basically generation by algorithm (or some kind of automated setup) rather than by hand or 'manual' generation (like painting a picture).

Where I work there's lots of use of SideFX Houdini, and we regularly talk about how "procedural" any given setup is, where "more procedural" means either that it has a 'seed' that can be randomised, to generate an infinite number of varieties, or (more importantly) the setup is more capable of working with new versions of input assets (a new version of animation or a different 3d model, say), whilst still robustly producing a correct-enough result.

It sounds like gp might mean this sense, but you've got something more formal in mind?

[a-nikolaev]

Okay, yeah, I agree that the more important part in procedural generation is to be able to produce a large population of interesting artifacts. The means to get there can involve more or less randomness (it can be a small seed input, a set of parameters, or a random sequence of numbers).

Even something like Mandelbrot or Julia sets (or similar fractals) are fully deterministic algorithms, but the choice of the position and scale (quite a small initial input) is sufficient to generate a large variety of interesting results => procedural generation.

The procedure must be making some kind of sequence of choices that leads to a set of diverging final outcomes. The choices can be prescribed by some kind of input value, or determined by a PRNG of the generation procedure itself (also actually a deterministic sequence).

However, not everything made by a computed program should be called "procedurally generated". Word docs are not a result of procedural generation. Arithmetic operators and sorting algorithms are not procedural generation techniques by themselves (although they can be used in procedural generation as building blocks).

[danwills]

I think that we agree about the 'random-seed' type of procedural generation, however a word document is hardly even generated by an algorithm at all! It's usually generated entirely by the author (perhaps with semi-code-like templates if they use that part?). GPT3/etc would be an example of 'procedural' word-processing, to me.

Where we mainly might not agree yet is about setups that instead process input-assets, and the idea is not for them to explore the parameter-space, but just to re-execute the effect as close to as it was intended as possible, and how reliably they do this can be called how 'procedural' they are. It is not usually expected to involve huge amounts of extra exploration to find something that works for a new input, as long as the effect is set up to be 'procedural' enough. This is a VFX-based perspective and I'd expect a games-perspective on this stuff to be quite different!