It’s interesting to see what heights artificial intelligence has reached as of late, with programs designed to think for themselves and, in some way, provide an unusual entertainment, even if users aren’t necessarily “hands on” with it.
That’s exactly what a team at the University of Tubingen, Germany has done, creating an AI program for the Nintendo game Super Mario Advance that essentially has the heroic Mario character playing as . . . himself.
According to CNET, the program allows Mario to respond to certain vocal commands from folks as part of a play session, although it can generally experience emotions and act on its own behalf in response to certain commands and inquiries.
The program utilizes a speech recognition toolkit put together by Carnegie Mellon, which understands these commands, even though Mario can essentially make the decisions for himself.
Interacting with items in the environment can go a long way into helping with the learning process, even if it’s something as simple as jumping on the head of a Goomba.
“Mario will collect coins if he is hungry, whereas when he is curious he will explore his environment and autonomously gather knowledge about items he does not know much about yet,” the researchers stated on their website. “We have developed and implemented artificial adaptive systems that learn, develop and behave autonomously based on learning principles derived from cognitive psychology and neuroscience.”
“Meanwhile, we have investigated behavioral flexibilities and spatial representations and perceptions to verify or evaluate the developed computational models and to gain further insights on how space is perceived and behavior is controlled,” it explained.
The video below shows more of these actions in place. It’s quite unique, and it’s a curious thought to see if we’ll see this kind of behavior in future game releases.
