Don't want to play Super Mario? Well, good, because according to Researchers at the University of Tubingen in Germany, you don't have to. Mario can play his game all by himself!
Cognitive Scientists have injected AI into the sprite of Super Mario, giving him the ability to speak, listen, and experience emotions. And to top it all off, Mario can even learn from his mistakes, and learn not to make them again in the future, he can also learn what happens when he interacts to certain stimuli, such as collecting coins.
“We have equipped Mario with an internal motivated state, for example to collect sufficient coins whilst he is interacting with the game. We give him internal needs - what we call a constant homeostatic state - like hunger, and whenever this equilibrium becomes unbalanced Mario learns to respond based on his previous interactions with objects,” ~Martin Butz, head of cognitive modeling at the University of Tubingen~Mario can also learn as he goes. At first he may not know how anything about Goombah's for instance, but when he kills one, he will have more knowledge about them, such as what happens when you jump on a Goombah's head. He is constantly curious about his surroundings and is always learning more and more about his environment in the process. You can also simply tell him what will happen, and he can learn what happens to a Goombah just from listening to you tell him. And if you ask him how he is feeling, he may respond with a variety of emotions, including Happiness and Fear. This project was part of an annual video competition organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, or AAAI for short. They release videos every year from scientists from every corner of the globe to showcase Artificial Intelligence in various ways, shapes, and forms.
Is this a huge step in the development of Artificial Intelligence? Will we be seeing self aware robots taking over the world soon? What do you think about this? Cool, or no?
