arXiv subjects

Junyi Chu

Publications and source records attributed to Junyi Chu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

What makes an action sequence enjoyable to watch?

People often seek out ways to watch others perform complex action sequences (e.g., sports). What makes some sequences more enjoyable to watch than others? We generated 24 video clips of gameplay from a Flappy Bird-style video game. Clips varied in difficulty (how often players succeeded on average) and in moment-to-moment uncertainty (how likely the player was to crash at any given step). Participants (N=864) rated each video on one of three dimensions: how much they enjoyed it, how difficult the level appeared, or how dangerous the player's trajectory appeared. We found that participants preferred videos where the player seemed to be completing more difficult obstacle courses, but dangerousness did not predict enjoyment ratings. These findings show how procedurally generated stimuli can isolate the factors that affect how enjoyable an action sequence is to watch.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Generation and Evaluation in the Human Invention Process through the Lens of Game Design

The human ability to learn rules and solve problems has been a central concern of cognitive science research since the field's earliest days. But we do not just follow rules and solve problems given to us by others: we modify those rules, create new problems, and set new goals and tasks for ourselves and others. Arguably, even more than rule following and problem solving, human intelligence is about creatively breaking and stretching the rules, changing the game, and inventing new problems worth thinking about. Creating a good rule or a good problem depends not just on the ideas one can think up but on how one evaluates such proposals. Here, we study invention through the lens of game design. We focus particularly on the early stages of novice, "everyday" game creation, where the stakes are low. We draw on a dataset of over 450 human created games, created by participants who saw an initial seed set of two-player grid-based strategy games. We consider two different cognitive mechanisms that may be at work during the early processes of intuitive game invention: an associative proposal based on previous games one has seen and compute-bounded model-based evaluation that an everyday game creator may use to refine their initial draft proposals. In our preliminary work, we conduct a model-based analysis of how people invented new games based on prior experience and find that generated games are best described by a model which incorporates model-based estimates of game quality at a population level. Our work points to how human invention is based not only on what people propose, but how they evaluate and offers a computational toolkit to scale empirical studies of model-based simulation in open-ended human innovation.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

On the distribution of $\alpha p^2$ modulo one in the intersection of two Piatetski--Shapiro sets

Let $\lfloor t\rfloor$ denote the integer part of $t\in\mathbb{R}$ and $\|x\|$ the distance from $x$ to the nearest integer. Suppose that $1/2<\gamma_2<\gamma_1<1$ are two fixed constants. In this paper, it is proved that, whenever $\alpha$ is an irrational number and $\beta$ is any real number, there exist infinitely many prime numbers $p$ in the intersection of two Piatetski--Shapiro sets, i.e., $p=\lfloor n_1^{1/\gamma_1}\rfloor=\lfloor n_2^{1/\gamma_2}\rfloor$, such that \begin{equation*} \|\alpha p^2+\beta\|<p^{-\frac{14(\gamma_1+\gamma_2)-27}{43}+\varepsilon}, \end{equation*} provided that $27/14<\gamma_1+\gamma_2<2$. This result constitutes an generalization upon the previous result of Dimitrov [4].

math.NT↗