“Revolutionary AI Model Turns into Super Mario Bros. Expert after Binge-Watching Gameplay!”
“New AI Model Can Simulate ‘Super Mario Bros.’ After Watching Gameplay Footage”
“‘We’re at a place where AI can do some really interesting things,” writes Matt Simon in Wired. “It’s getting eerily good at spotting cancer, predicting seizures, and even devising new recipes for pizza that probably taste like love and complexity divided by regret.”
But folks, let’s take a moment. It begins innocuously, with artificial intelligence being our obliging sidekick in our daily lives, helping us do something as simple as perhaps creating the perfect margherita. Now, however, it’s gone a step further. It’s learning how to play Super Mario Bros.
This intelligence isn’t born out of a hundred hours of robotic thumbs grappling with a vintage game controller. Oh no, it’s a lot more sci-fi than that. An AI model can now learn to play a video game simply by observing.
Scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology and Facebook AI reportedly developed an AI model that can recreate the game engine of Super Mario Bros after watching someone else play it in a mere two minutes. Not only does it understand the rules, but it also faithfully recreates the game engine, complete with those tricky ghost villains and the princess who is always in another castle.
So you may ask, what’s the fuss? It’s certainly interesting from an optimist’s perspective. It’s individually harmless, right? It’s not like it’s the rise of the machines, at least not yet.
However, the naysayers and cynics (this blog takes pride in being one of them) will have you view this development from another angle. Is it just about simulating games?
According to some scientists, this model works out what’s important and what’s not in a given scenario, and that it learns all this from the most minute of patterns. This doesn’t merely imply recreating our favourite childhood video game. It tamely trots into How To Take Over The World 101 territory.
In conclusion, this AI can now play Super Mario Bros better than most of us after studying for a meager two minutes. That’s equivalent to a toddler observing an open heart surgery and then performing it flawlessly. A little unnerving, isn’t it?
Man, now all we need is a pizza-making robot to wipe cold perspiration off our foreheads while we leisurely play our games. But then again, who needs us to play when an AI can do it instead? Interesting times, indeed!