Last year's AI Video Competition featured Mario Lives! An Adaptive Learning AI Approach for Generating a Living and Conversing Mario Agent, in which researchers from Germany's University of Tübingen explained how they'd modified Super Marion Brothers to turn the characters into adaptive, machine-learning chatterbots that discovered how to play the game together.
This year, they're back with Mario Becomes Social!, which refines the techniques, showing how the characters can learn to behave cooperatively, independently experiment with the game environment, and share knowledge about how to explore its spaces.
By watching one another and communicating, the figures are able to learn about their environment. This means that Mario can ask Toad how to collect coins and then try it himself. Another new feature is that the characters work together to achieve common goals. For example, Mario and Toad work out that they can stand on one another's heads to reach coins which are high up. The game even enables friends to become enemies who crash into one another intentionally, hurting themselves. The computer scientists gave Mario and his friends the basic ability to start a fight with opponents, and to gradually refine this competetive interaction.
In 2015, the team presented the first video in this series, in which 'Mario' (in a clone of Super Mario Bros) was equipped with artificial intelligence. Mario was introduced as a self-motivated creature who gets to know his environment, learns what he can do in it, and even communicates with the user about his knowledge as well as his current goals. As a result, Mario is no longer simply a reactive character controlled by the user. Rather, he appears to live in his environment and the user can influence his behavior only by giving abstract orders or motivational instructions via speech input. This will make Mario focus on particular aspects of his world – such as collecting coins, clearing the level, or learning as much as possible. When setting goals, Mario will attempt to reach them – possibly asking for help or further information. Now the programming of artificial social intelligence into several characters has made the inhabitants of the Super Mario universe even more human.
Super Mario gets social intelligence
[University of Tübingen]
(via O'Reilly Radar)
