Friendly AI Supporter Solves Super Mario
Robin Baumgarten, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, author of the AI Panic blog, and fellow Friendly AI supporter, recently got some nice blog coverage for creating an AI (script, really) that plays Super Mario more effectively than any human. Check it:
At this point I must brag that I have beaten Lost Levels. The tactics that the script uses can actually work pretty well -- in a lot of the harder levels, running semi-blindly seems to work better than taking it slow and easy, which just puts you at greater risk of being attacked. I wonder -- which video game will get solved next? Many of them seem trivially easy, but platformers (like Mario) seem relatively challenging, from an AI perspective.
Congrats, Robin! I am reminded of the Black Belt Bayesian post "Speedrunning Through Life". Superintelligences will speedrun through real life problem-solving, analysis, and mediation in the same way that Robin's AI speedruns through Mario. Though the real world is more complex than a game, the concept is fundamentally the same. I find it hilarious that there are humans who actually believe that their problem-solving acumen and speed is about as good as anyone could get, or that the real world is anything but a highly complex video game where you can feel pain and death is final.
August 17th, 2009 - 08:09
It all depends upon how the script is working. If they have a camera looking at the computer screen and some automation sending joystick/keyboard signals then that would be moderately impressive. There are some gambling systems which work like that, which make it impossible to tell wiether the player is human or not. If it’s just a program which has complete access to all the objects within the game then this is much less impressive, and not really comparable to how a human would play the game.
But I do take your point about AIs being able to operate on an entirely different time scale.
August 17th, 2009 - 08:18
This is undoubtedly cool, I’m not sure just how impressive it is, though.
For years, ,many multiplayer games have been full of cheaters who use bots to auto-aim and do a bunch of other stuff to give an unfair advantage. If this uses similar techniques, I’d say the multiplayer cheats are more impressive as the opponents don’t follow set strategies like the opponents in Mario do.
August 18th, 2009 - 13:12
Shameless plug here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-6fBVjouPU
It’s a Mario style platformer, where the levels are randomly generated. Each level is guaranteed to be possible. You can always watch the computer perform the level. All of the video you see is of a computer playing actually.
August 18th, 2009 - 13:23
Awesome. Are you the creator?
Have you ever played “I Wanna Be the Guy”? :)
August 18th, 2009 - 17:57
I’m the lead programmer, yup.
I’ve never played I Wanna Be the Guy, but I’ve played similar games by the looks of it. Cloudberry Kingdom is much less frustrating. The level generator is designed to give the player a challenge, not a headache =P