Ahead-of-time Compilation for Diverse Samplers of Constrained Design Spaces

Abdelrahman Madkour, Ross Mawhorter, Stacy Marsella, Adam M. Smith, Steven Holtzen

Abstract: We introduce a new approach to deploying constraint-based content generators that better supports online generation. Constraint-based generators ensure that certain properties hold in each design they output. However, when deployed a general-purpose solver is often required, thus guarantees come with unpredictable search times and little control over sequentially-generated outputs. In this paper, we outline how we can encode design constraints into a compact circuit representation that affords generation without search. These generators yield samples that are distributed uniformly over the space of valid designs. We illustrate our approach with binary decision diagrams (BDDs) in comparison to the traditional approach with answer-set programming (ASP) in two scenarios: a grid-based tile placement scenario inspired by WaveFunctionCollapse, and a playable platformer level design scenario. These compiled design-space models make constraint-based methods easier to deploy by improving on both the running time and diversity of previous constraint-based methods.