Mario is one of the most iconic video game characters in history – having appeared in over 200 games, several television series and a feature film. But now, for the first time, the pudgy Italian plumber from the Mushroom Kingdom has been given a mind of his own.
A team of cognitive modelling researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany have developed an artificial intelligence system that allows Mario to learn about his environment, experience emotions and respond to voice commands.
In a video created to demonstrate the their work, the researchers show how Mario can describe his 'feelings' and act accordingly. For, example, when he is hungry he will collect coins, and when he is curious he will explore his environment autonomously.
Using Carnegie-Mellon’s speech-recognition toolkit, Mario can understand a wide range of questions and instructions, and follow a logic and grammar tree to decide which response to give or which action to take.
Mario can calculate how many moves he needs to make to reach a certain position, and also learn that jumping on a Goomba (one of his mushroom-shaped enemies) will destroy it.
The Mario AI project is part of an annual competition run by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence – the aim of which is to document advances in artificial intelligence. The full list if entrants can be found here.
The students at the University of Tubingen used Mario as part of their efforts to find out how the human mind works. Their focus is on the developmental aspects of the mind and the highly "interactive modularity" found in the brain.
