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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

FYI the video is worth a full watch. The author of the paper is painfully funny.

I can confirm it was well worth my 16 mins.

This really makes me want to go back to my game and play some more with AI. Although, at the same time I realize that's the mistake I made - making the game/platform for creating AI. It really takes a toll. This guy uses existing NES games, which allows him to focus on the AI and even generic game learning. Brilliant.

You can clearly see the advantages of AI in the short-term play (think in the order of milliseconds, exact frame-by-frame button presses) over anything a human could ever achieve.

Imagine combining the short-term button-mashing of said AI with the long-term planning of human players...

Some of the tool-assisted speedruns feed scripts into the emulator. One of the pokemon yellow arbitrary code execution runs used some clojure: http://tasvideos.org/3767S.html

You're looking for the pleasingly-symmetric-to-AI acronym IA, for Intelligence Amplification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification

On game AI, here's a neat tidbit.

Feed your bot AI with information that is 200 ms old and force it to extrapolate 200 ms in the future for its aiming/movement/etc. logic. It will make the bot much more human-like with noticeable reaction time, so it could be tricked by sudden changes in your behaviour. Such a simple but powerful AI trick.

Crikey, just read the paper:

""" On a scale from "the title starts with Toward" to "Donald Knuth has finally finished the 8th volume on the subject," this work is a 3. """

Both the video and paper are well worth going through!

The Abstract is 16 words. The introduction begins with "The Nintendo Entertainment System is probably the best video game console, citation not needed." Need we say more?

Also, I wish non-programming fields of media would also adopt pythonic triple-quotation marks.

Eww, why would you want triple quotation marks being adopted anywhere?

What overlying function in print would they serve exactly?

Many people forget that using inch marks in place of quotation marks (which don't have neating issues) is an ASCII-only phenomenon.

They aren't "inch marks". They're straight double quote marks. The prime (used for feet, arc minutes), double prime (used for inches, arc seconds) and ditto mark are all distinct.

The paper is worth a full read as well. One of my favorite bits... "The FCEUX emulator is about a jillion lines of C++-ish code, was intended as an interactive GUI application, contains support for multiple di erent platforms, and the code is, on a scale from a pile of horse shit to not horse shit, approximately a 2"

As one of the major contributors to FCEUX, I feel that the author is misrepresenting the code quality of FCEUX. To be fair, I'd say the code would rate about 1.5 or maybe 1 on said scale.

Around 09:20 in the video he gets 500 points from kicking a shell into a koopa into another koopa. How does that 500 point score happen?

That's just normal in Super Mario Brothers 1, kills by shell start at 500 points and escalate for more targets. All the later games start at 100 instead, SMB3 and SMW and the New SMB series.

Very true. The end was hilarious.

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