Computer program that learns to play games

[P]

"Learnfun" plays Super Mario Bros and other games, and does surprisingly good!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY

It's really fun to watch!

[treismac]

I'd love to run the program on some select platformers!  How would it do on DuckTales, I wonder...

[L___E___T]

I bet it would fail hard at Castlevania

It was a lot of fun to watch though, playing from an interesting perspective.

[treismac]

A no death run on Ghost n' Goblins (Makaimura) with the program's non-sentient, drunken fox style on display would be quite a sight to behold.   

[P]

Oh that would be cool! It seems to be good at avoiding enemies.

[Magicantian]

I like how at the very end of the video, the computer program paused the game right when it was about to lose in Tetris.

"The only way to win, is not to play." 

[P]

Yeah I liked that too. He is such a sore looser, lol!

And it's a War Games reference.

[nerdynebraskan]

That was definitely interesting. I'm not terribly surprised that a program built to play Super Mario Bros. could extrapolate a bit and do some things in other platformers like Adventure Island. I'm also not surprised that the same program would fail horribly with Karate Kid and Tetris. It was wild to see the program exploiting bugs in the games, like stomping enemies from below in Super Mario Bros. I had actually never heard of that until I watched this.

Who knew that Skynet's first steps toward enslaving mankind came from mastering NES platformers?