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Games

The AI Mario Kart Can't Beat Human Gamers—Yet

Humans are still beating SethBling's Mario Kart-playing algorithm, but it's getting better.

Google's self-driving cars might be a ways away, but the self-driving Mario Kart AI is here right now. Earlier this month, Mario got a machine-learning upgrade when YouTuber SethBling let an algorithm loose in Super Mario World, where it developed a rhythmic and efficient pathway through the 2D Mushroom Kingdom's first level. This past weekend, he and Twitch user Winterbunny let it's grid-based analysis loose on Super Mario Kart's race track, where it crashed, skidded, and bumped its way to a fairly ok time of 1'31"46 over the course of 9 generations, but which is one and a half times the human high score of 00'57"90—take that Skynet!

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Early on the algorithm's hamfisted technique was reminiscent of my mom's gaming style (minus the giving up in frustration part), but even as it gets better there are still obvious limitations to its learning ability. Redditor AlanZucconi, who posted the video demo to r/MachineLearning, points out, "The original MarI/O was definitely over-fitting a level. In fact, Seth has to train EVERY new level. An effective AI would have solved new levels once trained on the previous ones. MarI/O fails the validation test, but perhaps most of it is due to the fact the input never change [sic]." Other commenters also compare the project to experiments conducted by Swiss researcher and AI evangelist Jürgen Schmidhuber, designed to let a computer learn to beat a racing game from raw visuals alone.

The real test of SethBling's algorithm, brewing as we speak, might be a Mario adventure built in the complex 3D rending tool Unreal Engine (below), a demo of which went viral over the weekend. MarI/O Kart is currently losing to human gamers—for now—in real time on Twitch.tv.

See more of SethBling's videos on YouTube.

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