Researchers create ‘self-aware’ Super Mario with artificial intelligence

http://mashable.com/2015/01/19/super-mario-artificial-intelligence/

A team of German researchers has used artificial intelligence to create a “self-aware” version of Super Mario who can respond to verbal commands and automatically play his own game.

Artificial Intelligence helps Mario play his own game

Students at the University of Tubingen have used Mario as part of their efforts to find out how the human brain works.

The cognitive modelling unit claim their project has generated “a fully functional program” and “an alive and somewhat intelligent artificial agent”.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/30879456

Can Super Mario Save Artificial Intelligence?

The most popular approaches today focus on Big Data, or mimicking humansthat already know how to do some task. But sheer mimicry breaks down when one gives a machine new tasks, and, as I explained a few weeks ago, Big Data approaches tend to excel at finding correlations without necessarily being able to induce the rules of the game. If Big Data alone is not a powerful enough tool to induce a strategy in a complex but well-defined game like chess, then that’s a problem, since the real world is vastly more open-ended, and considerably more complicated.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/can-super-mario-save-artificial-intelligence