programming.reddit.com mario AI video #1

rictic on reddit started this thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/98rav/want_a_weekend_project_let...

And a few of us jumped in. I (a1k0n on reddit) started a parallel physics simulation of Mario's moves given an action, and implemented an A* searcher with a "time steps taken to run to edge of screen" heuristic.

Here's a test video of our Mario AI in action after the weekend's hacking session. This is basically doing the same thing as Robin B -- A* search on the action space. We haven't implemented enemy sensing and prediction yet, so the world is paused (no enemy collisions, no firing of bullets).

For others interested in the competition: this world is seed 1808809737, difficulty 10, length 1024. I limited the state search to expand only 3000 nodes each frame. There are some points where he misses a jump that he would probably be able to make faster with a larger search horizon, but it breaks the realtime constraint.

rictic has recently implemented a parellel threaded realtime search, which would improve things (but the behavior becomes nondeterministic so I didn't use it when taking this video).

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Infinite Mario
• Mario AI
• speedrun

[jagwio]

s/reddit/redis/ DAMMIT

[0xec1ec71c]

@jagwio Yes, this has nothing to do with redis.

[amoxys]

Seems like your simulation is working very well. I've reviewed Mario's implementation and thought its behaviour was hard to predict because of many hidden variables. So my simulation is very inaccurate but I think I'll try again. Keep up the good work!

[0xec1ec71c]

There are a bunch of hidden variables, yes, but the simulation is entirely deterministic, so it's just a matter of slogging through the math buried in the code.

[jagwio]

@0xec1ec71c sorry my rock was foreclosed last month.

[jagwio]

I just started using and learning about Reddis the other day... now I have some respect for it ;)

To be serious, this is the most accurate movement I have seen from these AI videos.

[DaTeL237]

impressive start. keep developing :D

is your code available somewhere? (github send me back to mainpage whereever I try to go, and svn won't check out the repo :x)

got some ideas for improving a graph search like this

[ReasonTide]

Good start guys