Tag Archives | AI

An AI that “solves” Super Mario Bros.

By on April 2, 2013 in News 0

Picture: Nintendo, Flickr user labnol (CC)

Super Mario Bros. has been around for 28 years, and is an important part of not only gaming history but international popular culture, and has spawned untold bundles of merchandise, fan films, street art, and even ghost stories. The ways that people are engaging with the iconic sprites from our childhood are seemingly unending; they engineer numerous mods, remixes, and even path-finding algorithms that allow bots to play for our amusement (appropriately called ‘Infinite Mario‘).

Moving this last concept towards its ultimate end, computer scientist Tom Murphy has now designed a program that can “solve” NES games like other mathematical problems.

via  Nobel Intent (WIRED UK):

At SigBovik 2013, [Tom Murphy] presented a program that “solves” how to play Super Mario Bros., or any other NES game, like it’s just another kind of mathematical problem. And for those who know that SigBovik is an annual computer science conference dedicated to spoof research, hosted on April 1 every year, Murphy stresses that this is “100 percent real.”

He outlines his method in a paper, “The First Level of Super Mario Bros.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 0

Supercomputers and Slang

By on February 16, 2013 in News 12

We’re still waiting for machines to pass the Turing test. Recent film work with the chatbot Cleverbot shows the futility of passing the bar for natural conversation. But there are certainly things that bots do better than us, and even those humans who are trying to stifle their progress.

Via Fortune:

Eric Brown, a research scientist with IBM (IBM), is the brains behind Watson, the supercomputer that pummeled human opponents on Jeopardy! in 2011. The biggest difficulty for Brown, as tutor to a machine, hasn’t been making Watson know more but making it understand subtlety, especially slang. “As humans, we don’t realize just how ambiguous our communication is,” he says.

Case in point: Two years ago, Brown attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for “Oh, my God,” to slang such as “hot mess.”

But Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 12

Singularity Averted, The Google Machine Still Can’t Parse Irony

By on September 14, 2012 in News 3

So now that google calculates bacon numbers automatically, a few pop culture mavens have been systematically trying to break it:

For example, I typed in the name of a high school friend who was legitimately in a movie with Kevin Bacon — Ben Saypol (hi, Ben!), “Telling Lies in America,” 1997 — and that gave me nothing, too, even though Ben is totally someone in the real world. And if you think you’re going to type in your own name and get an answer, forget it, unless you’re Susan Sarandon or something. It may not recognize you either.

The Google Box’s problems go deeper than that, however. Disinfo has discovered through the application of highly efficient research ninjas that the Google Box believes that Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was actually in the movie Powder. This seems to be because of long running joke based on the fact that Corgan is a creepy, pasty bald pale white guy, just like the creepy, pasty bald white guy main character in the creepy childmolester directed film sensation of 1995.… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 3