ABSTRACT
This chapter serves as peoples' first-time hiker's map of the most well-worn and pedestrian trails in the vast wilds of procedural generation. Pseudorandom number generators start from an initial seed value and then perform a mathematical operation on that seed value that produces the next value in the random series. A Dijkstra map is generated by taking a set of seed points and calculating the distance from each node in the graph to the closest seed point. A hash function's job is to take some input data and transform it into an output value. This output value needs to be the same for any given input. Cellular automata are a broad category of systems that operate on a graph of discrete cells. They define a set of states for each cell and a set of rules that describe how the state of each cell changes based on the state of adjacent cells.
