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> even rules which are not visible on-screen.

If a rule was changed but it's never visible on the screen, did it really change?

> It simply generated frames and the appearance of play mechanics from a game it sampled (which humans created).

Simply?! I understand it's mechanically trivial but the fact that it's compressed such a rich conditional distribution seems far from simple to me.

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> If a rule was changed but it's never visible on the screen, did it really change?

Well for "some" games it does really change

> Simply?! I understand it's mechanically trivial but the fact that it's compressed such a rich conditional distribution seems far from simple to me.

It's much simpler than actually creating a game....

If someone told you 10 years ago that they were going to create something where you could play a whole new level of Doom, without them writing a single line of game logic/rendering code, would you say that that is simpler than creating a demo by writing the game themselves?

There are two things at play here: the complexity of the underlying mechanism, and the complexity of detailed creation. This is obviously a complicated mechanism, but in another sense it's a trivial result compared to actually reproducing the game itself in its original intended state.

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