
Fish vs. Fish in Street Fighter II - cyberfart
http://www.twitch.tv/fishplaystreetfighter
======
tormeh
Can the fish see the game? What if the fish were rewarded for winning? Can we
train fish to play street fighter? How about rats?

~~~
wdewind
I don't think this is a possibility. While you could get some sort of feedback
loop going (fish gets hit it gets shocked, fish hits it gets food or
something), there would be no way for the fish to understand the massive
amount of information they'd need to grok from the game, so they'd just be
getting all this random stimuli with nothing to attach it to.

I can't see anyway to bridge the gap of making the fish understand the stimuli
in relation to what's going on in the game. I would imagine the same is true
for rats.

~~~
jpatokal
The fish doesn't need to grok the entire game, it just has to be better than
the other fish. (Cue that joke about two people being chased by a bear and one
pausing to put on his sneakers. "What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear!"
"I don't have to, I just have to outrun you!")

For example, if fish A realizes that swimming around corner X gets it food,
because X happens to correspond to "move forward and punch", that's enough to
win the game if fish B doesn't figure out the same.

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Magi604
If you like to watch computer-controlled 2d fighting characters with actual
decent AI (most of the time) squaring off against each other, check out
[http://www.saltybet.com/](http://www.saltybet.com/) .

There are over 5000 characters in the database, and it runs 24 hours a day.
The matches can get really amusing sometimes.

~~~
IWillScoop
It really is amazing, I still wonder how Salty made it.

Also some protips to those who are interested:

1) Always bet DBZ

2) Never trust chat

3) Never bet DBZ

~~~
Magi604
From a technical standpoint it doesn't seem too hard to set everything up
(over time), but the concept and then the monetization of it is pretty
ingenious.

I've seen Salty himself in the chat every now and then. I wonder how much time
he spends working on the site vs how much he makes off of it every month.

------
minimaxir
Background: This is the logical conclusion of Fish Plays Pokemon
([http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-exclusive-interview-
with...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-exclusive-interview-with-the-
fish-playing-pokemon)), which was a hackathon project and a play on Twitch
Plays Pokemon.

~~~
oneweirdtrick
I believe this is actually the logical conclusion of the Internet.

~~~
pimlottc
Nah, that would involve cats playing video games.

~~~
yoodenvranx
I am not sure if cats are a good idea for this. But what about rats? Could we
teach them to do image recognition? Perhaps it could answer questions like "is
there a cat in this picture?". Since rats are quite small this approach could
scale well.

~~~
lawlessone
The rat rack.

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SchizoDuckie
And as a finishing touch, man made 2 fish fight eachother on Street Fighter
and streamed it to the world in real time.

God I love the internet :D

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kevin_thibedeau
He needs to randomize the 1P/2P assignment because Aquarius seems to prefer
being on the right side of the tank and gets an unfair advantage as 1P.

~~~
ngokevin
Maybe Aquarius prefers the right side because Aquarius likes to win.

------
nsxwolf
A lot of engineering effort to watch Balrog jab and Blanka duck forever.

Fish are bad at playing Street Fighter II. I already intuitively knew this.

~~~
sharkweek
Watching them for a bit, I would say they're ~=> my mom playing Street Fighter
- the occasional times she would play video games with me, the results of her
play often looked like this.

Fish > My mom at video games? Perhaps.

------
tinco
Stream seems to be down, here's what was on:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHrRksz-
XLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHrRksz-XLI)

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Eiriksmal
Soooooo much more engaging than the Fish Plays Pokemon the creator links to. I
explained it to a coworker (...in marketing) and couldn't help but giggle at
every other sentence in my explanation. "So the fish swim around in that
virtual grid, see, and that triggers button presses in the fighting game."
Sweet action, as the kids say.

------
eklavya
I don't get it, can someone please tell what is going on?

~~~
michaelmior
The position of two fish in a tank are tracked. The tank is divided into a
grid and the position of the fish in the grid determines the input into the
game.

~~~
eklavya
ooh cool :P

Thanks :)

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w-ll
Well given that its Street Fighter my best strategy was to always just mash
random buttons.

I do wonder if he choose the fish at random or tried to find more active
fishies.

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level09
Humans are pattern recognition animals, we like to look at anything random and
extract meaningful patterns from it.

I see this game as a clear example of that, where (random) fish movement is
fed to a computer game and translated into game play (pattern). I fail though
to conclude anything particularly interesting if one fish won the game :)

------
Natsu
Hypnotic. Aquarius can't seem to lose.

~~~
bluetidepro
He is a winning machine. His gold color suits him well. Aquarius is an
impeccable fighter.

~~~
Natsu
The last ~10 or so matches I've seen show Aquarius winning, often by a tiny
margin. These fish might be more skilled than some real players.

They should make it so that you can play vs. a fish now.

EDIT: I spoke too soon, the Bruce is making a comeback.

~~~
deckar01
Twitch plays Street Fighter against fish!

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coldcode
I wonder now if one could train chimpanzees to play the game successfully.

~~~
pinkyand
Yes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkuO-8hfGhM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkuO-8hfGhM)

~~~
alceufc
Nice, but I think it is not real, just marketing for the new Planet of the
Apes movies.

------
golergka
What I'd really want to see is two monkeys playing the game against each other
for the treat. If given some time, I believe that they can get better than
most humans.

------
pawn
I had a dream one time when I was a kid that I trained a puppy to play Street
Fighter 2. I'd never imagine it would ever be linked to anything this close to
reality.

------
sagnew
Haha this is awesome! First a couple of HackNY fellows make Fish Plays
Pokemon, now this! I can't wait for what fish related fun comes next.

~~~
goshx
Fish playing 2048 would be my guess

~~~
joshuacc
Fish playing Flappy 2048 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431047)

------
aaronm14
Anyone know if these guys making these games are using some kind of library
for the image processing or what? Seems pretty complicated to do

~~~
Shrugs
I can confirm that FishPlaysPokemon uses OpenCV. There's a wealth of knowledge
and tutorials, so if you just want to isolate certain color ranges (what
they're doing), I guarantee there are tons of resources. There's also Python
bindings to make things even more friendly. After that, it's some simple math
to figure out which quadrant it's in and then trigger the correct button
press.

~~~
aaronm14
Hm, good call, thanks for that. Looks like there's a binding for Nodejs out
there too: [https://github.com/peterbraden/node-
opencv](https://github.com/peterbraden/node-opencv)

------
amatera
If one of the fish managed to make an Hadoken it should get a job at Konami
(or at least a nice place on an "Konami"-Desk)

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zeeshanm
Would be interesting to observe if there may happen to be some pattern in fish
movements as more data is collected over time.

------
spiritplumber
what's missing from "fish plays game" is some sort of reward for the fish. I
wonder how clever they can get.

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louhike
These fishes are more entertaining than the Pokemon game which was played
through the chat room.

------
thestonefox
what about the parody of
[http://twitch.tv/garlicplays](http://twitch.tv/garlicplays)

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antidamage
I was actually hoping for a writeup on the differences between regular fish
and fish in SFII, but this is also good.

Next we need kittens versus fish. Kittens are much more active.

------
lowlevel
This is best thing I've seen all year.

------
grej
If I could upvote you 10 times for the most ridiculously useless (but cool)
thing I've seen on HN, I would. You win HN for today sir.

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andersthue
This is the answer to life, the univers and everything!

------
dang
Url changed from [http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/20/7000-people-are-watching-
tw...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/20/7000-people-are-watching-two-fish-
play-play-street-fighter/), which points to
[http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/20/6048973/fish-vs-fish-
stree...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/20/6048973/fish-vs-fish-street-
fighter-twitch), which points to this.

------
gzur
I thought I was going to see Phil Fish fight himself, somehow.

~~~
hnal943
That already exists, it's called Indie Game: The Movie.

------
codr
Just gotta say this is a strange outcome of our technological developments.. I
mean think of the energy that was spent making this work - it could've been
done doing something.. I dunno fucking useful?!

It's almost as bad as watching two "grown-ups" play Street Fighter lol.

~~~
serf
this exercise is useful.

1) the creators had a chance to learn/practice their favorite libraries and
languages -- computer vision is hugely useful and applicable to nearly all
domains.

2) the creators got spectators to think about the technologies involved,
possibly motivating some to learn about them, and undoubtedly teaching a few
people about things they didn't know the concepts behind. (computer vision.
hell, check the comments on HN, a few of us didn't know how it worked and were
thus elucidated.)

