Playing Mortal Kombat with TensorFlow.js | Hacker News Reader

Playing Mortal Kombat with TensorFlow.js

blog.mgechev.com

149 pointsmgechev26 comments

Plug for my company Yuri https://www.yurigameai.com/

If you're interested in using ML techniques to create AI for your games please reach out!

I'm an ML scientist and video game designer and I'm looking to make it as easy as possible for game designers to use AI in creative ways in their games (e.g: drop in replacement, automatically adjusting the difficulty of levels and more)

What was the thought process behind the name Yuri? The first thing I think of when I see it (and I'm sure many think of) is the Japanese word.

The first thing I think of is "Welcome back, commander."

Maybe it's reference to Red Alert Yuri villan: http://cnc.wikia.com/wiki/Yuri

It should be noted that Yuri is a common female name in Japan.

It's a reference to Yuri from the Command and Conquer series. He uses mind control abilities to control his enemies and is OP as fuck.

I'm looking for something that has an association with mind control or AI that would click for most gamers out there

I'm a game designer and developer with 11 years of gamedev experience and decent understanding of ML (couple of online courses, nothing serious). I don't see how using ML for AI would be benificial in any way for any games that I've worked on.

ML makes AI stronger and makes it easer for it to beat players, but as a game designer, it's never my goal. My goal is to make it lose in competitive, interesting, but most importantly, understandable way: I want players to gradually learn patterns behind AI behaviour, understand them and subvert them.

May be it's because my experience is more about simpler and more action-focused games, and in 4x straregies things are different, of course - it's just my two cents.

Thank you for writing this. I definitely agree you need to build something fun first. For more action focused games the same techniques are extremely useful to learn advanced locomotion if you don't have access to a proper animation file. E.g: given the movement for a 7 legged bug can you learn the movement for an 8 legged bug and experiments have shown that yes this is indeed the case. On the more strategic front, Yuri will make it easy for you to explore difficulty gradients so you can just change a difficulty parameter and play the game yourself as opposed to rewriting the entire behavior for your AIs.

The pitch on the website does seem to target strategy games more and that reflects my personal preference as a strategy gamer. However, the techniques are general enough that I believe game designers will find it may just take a bit longer for some of the more creative applications to become more obvious.

Yet another way javascript is reinventing things from 25 years ago https://segaretro.org/Activator

Awesome idea and implementation. tutorial is useful and clear. Well done mgechev, great job!

Thank you!

How easy would it be to extend the model to trigger fatality move upon squeezing a bottle of ketchup ? Honest question about extensibility of the presented approach.

Fun idea! Updating the dimensions of the softmax layer and squeezing storage of ketchup bottles in front of the camera to collect data for the training set should do the job!

For a 2nd version, it might be better to use a fighting game like Overgrowth (https://store.steampowered.com/app/25000/Overgrowth/). I haven't tried it but it has a scripting and mod system.

Really cool. Sometimes when I get angry I just want to turn people into babies with my hands.

The guy has a pretty good stance, but I don't think looking at the computer screen while throwing kicks in another direction is such a good idea, I kinda expected him to round-kick his TV-set, almost disappointing he didn't.

There were moments I was close to kicking the TV-set while tuning the hyperparameters :-)

Support multiplayer, address some latency issues and we'd have an awesome game.

I was expecting a bot using Deep Reinforcement Learning or something.

This was amazing.

I want to see Liu Kang's flying bicycle kick performed this way.

Now this is really awesome! Nostalgia all the way

This would be so cool on an XBox!

This is great stuff!!

One of the greatest categorization solvers created by humans being used by a video game enthusiast to kick and punch his virtual opponent in the nuts.

What a bad attitude. This is cool. Not every project has to set out with the seriousness of curing cancer. Some of the most important discoveries are made tinkering. He also was kind enough to post his processes, methodology, code, etc to everyone on the internet for free, contributing to human knowledge. Maybe someone will read his blog and be inspired to apply techniques from it in ways that radically change the world - or maybe just push the envelope in a niche field somewhere. Who knows. You make it sound like there's not enough tensorflow to go around, and that he is somehow misusing our precious supply! I can't stand negative people like you.

My attitude was playful in the spirit of this blog. Yours is combative and petty. Expected better from an Uber engineer!

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