I’m putting the final pieces together for the release of the all new Project Nightjar game (due in the run up to Easter, of course!) and the automatic pattern generation has been a focus right up to this stage. The challenge I like most about citizen science is that along with all the ‘normal’ game design creative restrictions (is it fun? will it work on the browser?) you also have to satisfy the fairly whopping constraints of the science itself, determining which decisions impact on the observations you are making – and being sure that they will be robust to peer review in the context of publication – I never had to worry about that with PlayStation games 🙂
With this game, similar to the last two, we want to analyse people’s ability to recognise types of pattern in a background image. Crucially, this is a completely different perception process from recognition of a learned pattern (a ‘search image’), so we don’t want to be generating the same exact egg each time from the same description – we don’t want people to ‘learn’ them. This also makes sense in the natural context of course, in that an individual bird’s eggs will not be identical, due to there being many many additional non-deterministic processes happening that create the pattern.
The base images we are using are wrapped Perlin noise at different scales, and with different thresholds applied. These are then rotated and combined with each other and plain colours with the browser’s built in composite operations. Ideally we would generate the noise each time we need it with a different random seed to make them all unique, but this is way too slow for HTML5 Canvas to do (pixel processing in Javascript is still painful at this scale). To get around this we pre-render a set of variations of noise images, the genetic program picks one of four scales, and one of two thresholds (and one without threshold) and we randomly pick a new variation of this each time we render the egg. The image at the top shows the variation that happens across 6 example programs. Below are some of the noise images we’re using:
