Remember the Nintendo game that had Mario as playing the leading role in a fictional world with monsters and coins? In the era of artificial intelligence, technology has given Mario a mind of his own and live responses to commands that are given by the player. As if he was inspired by the all time story Pinocchio, Mario is aware of himself and even has a happiness reservoir.

In addition, the Mario Al Project has taught the beloved character how to make decisions that are based on the former levels and information that he has learned. The presentation of the game and the brain of it have been showed in a video by the Cognitive Modelling Group at Germany’s University of Tubingen. One of the lessons that Mario can learn is that jumping over an enemy, a small animal called Goomba, will lead to its death and as a consequence, he will learn to do it every time in order to win the game. His “internal emotional states” are the most attractive part of the new and improved Mario, making him and the player feel so similar. This feature creates a sort of a bond between the two, and makes the game even more enjoyable. The hunger of Mario is expressed in his needs of collecting coins and entering the Mushroom Kingdom. Scientists are positive about the outcome.

“We have developed and implemented artificial adaptive systems that learn, develop and behave autonomously based on learning principles derived from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Meanwhile, we have investigated behavioral flexibilities and spatial representations and perceptions to verify or evaluate the developed computational models and to gain further insights on how space is perceived and behavior is controlled.”

By far the most developed part of Mario and the game itself is shown by the fact that he can calculate the number of moves that he has to make if he has to reach a certain area.

Furthermore, the toolkit that is used for the speech-recognition in the game, which is called Carnegie-Mellon’s Sphinx, is attentively created in a form of a logic tree, in which Mario can understand various English sentences and commands. The logic tree uses grammar and of course, logic, and is capable of giving the main character powers like knowledge, acknowledging the past, its consequences and what kind of solutions he must apply if he wants to win the round.

A Mario A.I. Championship has been taking place for several years and this project seems to be the closest one to what they had in mind. The competition is a product of various international conferences of artificial intelligence and programming in the gaming field.

Image Source: News Week