

Mario Lives: An AI for creating a living and conversing agent [video] - syswsi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AplG6KnOr2Q

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Animats
There have been games with NPCs smarter than that. There have been _text
adventures_ with sentence understanding at that level. It's a cute demo, but
calling it a "living and conversing agent" is way too much.

"Mario, exit the game." "Do you really want to exit the game?" So not
impressed.

On the speech front, there is now an automated telemarketing agent which is
about as smart as most script-driven human telemarketers. That's a somewhat
scary development.

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new299
The telemarketing robots that are scripted well enough to continually deny
that they're robots are somehow the scariest/most impressive for me:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unRDMy7O62o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unRDMy7O62o)

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SG-
sounds like Lenny which is an anti telemarketer SIP bot you can forward calls
to:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5IKbFATKLo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5IKbFATKLo)

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new299
This is amazing. I wonder if anyone has done something similar for email spam.

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SG-
if you're interested in more of these calls (some are quite funny) there's an
entire reddit dedicated to it:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](http://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

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ilyaeck
Strictly speaking, this is hardly AI, but a rather traditional approach of
handwritten grammars.

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rcfox
"AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

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jacquesm
In this case it has been done quite a few times (and better).

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dmazin
Would love to see some examples!

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modeless
The speech recognition and synthesis are primitive compared to any smartphone
assistant these days. The natural language processing is about equivalent to
SHRDLU from the 1960s [1]. It turns out that this approach based on manually
constructing syntax trees and applying simple logic can make some fun demos
but is ultimately a dead end in terms of making systems that are actually
useful, as was discovered in the "AI winter".

The part that controls Mario looks similar (if not identical) to this:
[http://aigamedev.com/open/interviews/mario-
ai/](http://aigamedev.com/open/interviews/mario-ai/)

If you want to see the state of the art in using AI to play video games, look
no further than "Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning" [2], where a
single general AI system learns to play many different games. The generality
is what makes it impressive. Its only inputs are pixels and score, and its
only outputs are joystick and button state, just like a human player. This
makes it unlike these Mario systems which are hand programmed very
specifically for Mario, and use special instrumentation of the game state that
skips pixels entirely.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)

[2] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602](http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602)

~~~
nl
Note that the Atari playing system is what got Google interested in buying
Deep Mind (the company behind it). It was a pretty significant advance on the
state of the art at the time.

Deep Mind sold to Google for around $500M

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SunShiranui
I've always been interested in the use of natural language recognition in
games. Does anyone have some good resources about the topic?

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javert
This is a shrimp treadmill if I ever saw one. [1]

[1]
[http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/11/13/how-a-47-...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2014/11/13/how-a-47-shrimp-
treadmill-became-a-3-million-political-plaything/)

