
'Super Mario Bros.' has become a test bed for AI research - jonbaer
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-artificial-intelligence-researchers-love-super-mario-bros
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zxcvvcxz
I suspect the reason is this: Super Mario Bros constitutes a discrete Markov
decision making framework with a reasonably sized state space. I.e. one can
iterate through many possible future scenarios, similar to chess, on a modern
computer.

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stuxnet79
This actually makes a lot of sense. But I haven't seen a lot of high-impact
Mario papers. I mean I've noticed work being done but I didn't realize it is
quickly becoming a "thing".

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mindcrime
Funnily enough, I just got back into doing some AI stuff, and I had a vague
recollection a few days ago, that I'd read something about researchers using
games like Mario for this exact purpose. Guess that memory was real.

I'd like to work on some game playing AI, but since SMB isn't open source, I
went looking for an OSS clone of SMB, or something similar. Luckily enough,
there are quite a few:

[http://opensource.about.com/od/desktopapps/ss/5-Open-
Source-...](http://opensource.about.com/od/desktopapps/ss/5-Open-Source-Side-
scrolling-Games.htm)

This seem like something that could be a lot of fun. Or a massive time-sink.
:-)

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cing
I always thought it would make a fun game to build levels (Super Mario Maker
style, with build constraints) to defend against an onslaught of A.I. Marios.

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derefr
I'm honestly surprised that Super Mario Maker doesn't just run AI marios
through your course in the background (like a linter) to automatically give an
estimated difficulty delta for any change you might make—or even an initial
difficulty estimate for Course World before people start playing the course
for real. Nintendo does have a good few AI people (working on e.g. SSB4 doing
the Amiibo learning stuff), but you never see that learning applied anywhere
else.

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iLoch
You're honestly surprised by that?

