This is fascinating. I see its powered by weights and probabilities - would this be a very simple ancestor of things like Stable Diffusion that we have now, or would this be on a completely different branch (different approach)

It’s procedural generation but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. People today might use a big generative NN model to do this, using maybe a thousand times as much energy to get essentially the same result. Gen AI is definitely a big step forward in our relentless drive to make software more inefficient in order to compensate for any efficiency gains that the hardware guys come up with.