Sol LeWitt, Combinatorial Enumeration, and Rogue

Sol LeWitt wrote that "the serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.” This premise could be a set of axioms, a geometric constraint – or a roguelike level generator! From this viewpoint, the enumeration of all outputs from a procedural content system is itself a type of artwork.

Rogue, a text-based dungeon crawler from the 1980s, is one of the first games that used procedurally generated content. It generates a random layout for each level that the player explores. Rogue's simple algorithms for doing so have been a source of inspiration for game developers for decades. But because Rogue uses a 32-bit psuedorandom number generator, there are "only" four billion possible levels, and we can enumerate them all. (I'd hoped that there was some crunchy technical content about how to do so efficiently -- but it's actually pretty easy!)

I’ll explore this connection between 20th century conceptual art and 21st century expressive range analysis. I'll show some examples of serial art, more recent examples of complete enumerations, and some results from looking at the Rogue level generator.

• Intermediate
• Wildcard