In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that need help, and parents are actively and explicitly ask for it, even if the kids are borderline. Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. IEP students are also assigned to regular classroom so they are not treated differently and their identities aren't top secret. Mind you, the parents here can easily afford additional help if needed.
In other neighborhood, a long time family friend with two young children, the older one doesn't talk in school, period. Their speech is clearly behind. The parents refuse to have the kids assign IEP and insist that as long as the child is not disruptive, there is no reason to do so. Why the parents don't want to get help, because they feel the older child will get labelled and bullied and treated differently. The older child hates school and they are only in kindergarten. Teachers don't know what to do with the child.
My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.
I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.
The irony is that you explicitly posited your thing as a successor to Perlin noise when in fact, it's just a system that hallucinates detail on top of Perlin (feature) noise. This is dishonest paper bait and the kind of AI hubris that will piss off veterans in the scene.
2) I'm also disappointed that nowhere is there any mention of Rune Johansen's LayerGen which is the pre-AI tech that is the real precedent here.
Every time I see a paper from someone trying to apply AI to classic graphics tech, it seems they haven't done the proper literature study and just cite other AI papers. It seems they also haven't talked to anyone who knows the literature either. https://runevision.com/tech/layerprocgen/
3) >The top level input is perlin noise because it is genuinely the best tool for generating terrain at continental scale
This is a non-sense statement. I don't know what you are thinking here at all, except maybe that you are mistakenly using "Perlin" as a group noun for an entire style of functions.
Perlin has all sorts of well-known issues, from the overall "sameyness" (due to the mandatory zero-crossings and consistent grid size) as well as the vertical symmetry which fails to mimic erosion. Using it as the input to a feature vector isn't going to change that at all.
The idea of using plate tectonics is much better, but, vastly _different_ from what you have done. And btw, every plate tectonics simulation that I've seen does not look convincing. If you treat it as a simple transport problem, the result just looks like a Civilization 1 map. But if you want to treat it seriously, then the tectonics have to be the source of all your elevation changes, and not just some AI hallucination on top afterwards. The features would all have to make sense.
Your abstract states that classic terrains are "fundamentally limited in coherence"... but even to my non-geologist eye, your generated heightmaps seem incredibly blobby and uncanny. This makes me think that a real geologist would immediately spot all sorts of things that don't make any sense. For example, if you added water and rivers to the terrain, would it work, or would you end up with non-sense loops and Escher-like watersheds?
(mostly I'm disappointed that the level of expertise in AI tech is so low that all these things have to be pointed out instead of being things you already knew)
It's an amazing problem! I haven't spent much time on it - maybe 20-30 hours spread out over several years - but it _is_ something I come back to from time to time. And it usually ends up with me sitting there, staring at my laptop screen, thinking, "but what if I... no, crap. Or if we... well... no..."
TBH it's one of the things that excites me, because it makes it clear how far we still have to go in terms of figuring out these planet-scale physical processes, simulating them, deriving any meaningful conclusions, etc. Still so much to learn!