As if robots playing Destiny wasn’t enough, a Germany university has given Mario his own AI and taught him how to kill Goombas on his own…
Yesterday we had a prototype Terminator level-grinding its way through Destiny, today we have SkyNET itself being created – as advanced artificial intelligence for Mario in Super Mario World.
The project was undertaken by the University of Tübingen in Germany, and attempts to make Mario aware of his own environment and able to explore and play the game on its own.
As you can see from the video below it’s not just a case of teaching him how and when to jump, but of giving him his own emotional state – including happiness, curiosity, and hunger (eased by collecting coins).
On top of this he can be talked to via speech recognition, so that he can take verbal instructions.
There’s a disturbing bit in the video where he’s instructed to ‘kill enemy’ for the first time. He goes off to find a Goomba, jumps on it, and then reports that, ‘If I jump on Goomba then it maybe dies.’
Swap that for the phrase ‘kill all humans’ and you’ve got your AI apocalypse right there.
In all seriousness though the project is highly impressive, with nothing being scripted and Mario learning how to play on his own and planning ahead for difficult jumps.
We only wish ordinary games had AI that advanced, rather than the run-at-the-player-as-fast-as-you-can approach still used in most games today.
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