So, I was working on a a simple javascript game this weekend and I’ve implemented the core game mechanics, initial world generation, and user interface to display the score, instructions, etc. I’m feeling pretty good about it, but then I had the daunting task of building levels. This was seeming like it would be the most time consuming part of the whole ordeal and it was honestly starting to seem like a pain.

CycleGAN is a type of General Adversarial Neural Network for image to image translation. This involes taking images that belong to one domain and translating them to another. Now what do I mean by domain? In this case, a domain is a general category to which an image can belong. An example of a domain could be a set of landscape photos that were taken in the summer time. Another example of another domain could be set of landscape photos that were taken in the winter time. CycleGAN would allow us to translate the images taken in the summer to look as if they were taken in the winter. This is pretty powerful and can have some pretty interesting applications, especially for generative art.