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#a*search#supermario#gameai

Infinite Mario AI - Long Level

Robin Baumgarten

950 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Robin Baumgarten, creator of the Mario AI
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 17 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

1.2M views17 years ago3 recommendations

AI and machine learningGame developmentAlgorithmsGame programming

Robin Baumgarten demonstrates his award-winning Super Mario AI bot that uses the A* pathfinding algorithm to navigate levels in real time.

This is my attempt at a Mario AI using a path-finding algorithm called A*. The bot won both Mario AI competitions this year! You can see the path it plans to go as a red line, which updates when it detects new obstacles at the right screen border. It uses only information visible on screen. At the "close call" situation: In this version of Mario, when you're jumping while sliding on a wall, you jump backwards and upwards away from it. That's what the AI did twice to get out of the hole. This is possible in this version of Mario, which is a Freeware Java clone. See the links below for more info. The source code is now available on my homepage! More info: Competition: julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/index.php My Project Page: aipanic.com/h3h/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:marioai A star: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm Twitter: twitter.com/Robin_B Enjoy :) *Update*: My Mario AI won the ICE-GIC conference competition this year! Yay!

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a classic and impressive demonstration of using the A* pathfinding algorithm to solve real-time platforming game challenges.

Radixon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Mario AI competition might have a strong contender”

If you are impressed with this one follow the link in the video to here: link to this video For all my hours as a kid I was never this good, I never even realized I could kill the pipe fish by jumping from below.
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feralon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Using genetic algorithms to train a Mario AI”

Reminds me of the AI competition on infinite mario, recently: Here is a video of the winning bot (A* based approach), cool to watch, as they display its trajectory calculations. link to this video GA is cool and everything, but I am sometimes sceptical about its merits. Yes, it gives you a natural problem representation, but would it really have done a better job in this particular domain than using a technique like simulated annealing to move through the Mario AI parameter space? We just don't know without seeing benchmark comparisons. Maybe its much worse. So, its a cool application, but we should be cautious about how quickly we decide GA was a particularly suitable search algorithm.
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JonnieCacheon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Infinite Mario in HTML5”

The original java infinite mario was used in the fascinating Mario AI competition. Details and papers here: link Video of last years winning entry at work here: link to this video It's pretty interesting, a lot of people wrote/are writing high falutin' machine learning algorithms, but they are consistently trounced by good old A* techniques.
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u/hackinthebochsin r/compsci • Mentions

On “Fun AI Programming Projects”

Have you considered picking up Norvig's AI Modern Approach? There's plenty of programming exercises in each chapter. As you get further along you'll have the tools to apply multiple concepts to a single intelligent agent. If you want something to jump into right away, there's always Mario AI (to whet your appetite)
21View on Reddit

u/Shuduhin r/compsci • Mentions

On “"Super Mario Brothers" is hard”

Interesting, in this video it looks so easy though: (A* based AI playing a randomly generated mario level) link to this video
3View on Reddit

albertzeyeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Time lapse screencap video of a games programmer”

…n they ended. I would love to attend to some, just for the fun (because I don't know if I would have any chance to actually win). Where would be a good source for such competitions? Another fun competition I read about was the Super Mario AI competition in 2009 where the winner has succeeded with an A* algorithm which he presented in a nice video: link to this video The 2010 Mario AI championship also seems to be over already. Another fun competition I have heard about is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. However, while reading this is very interesting and quite fun, I am not sure if I would have fun to do this myself. (Somehow I am more focused on the output/result of the code and I like to…
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a1k0non Hacker News • Mentions

On “Game AI vs Traditional AI”

There was even an Infinite Mario AI contest in which you had to write a player which gets through as many levels of increasing difficulty as possible. The winning solution? A* of course: link to this video (I had an also-ran entry in this contest that took 3rd place, but my solution wasn't significantly different than Robin's -- his was able to anticipate bullets firing but mine wasn't) Writeup: link
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