Artificial Intelligence Learning to Beat Humans in Mario Kart

Some of you may remember that several months ago, an artificial intelligence learned to play Ms. Pac-Man and attained the highest possible score in the game, completely demolishing the highest-held score achieved by a human. More recently, another artificial intelligence has begun learning to play a different game and is learning how to play it by studying techniques used by human players.

Kotaku reports that YouTuber and programmer SethBling has created a bot called MariFlow, which is an AI that has learned how to play Super Mario Kart by studying SethBling’s gameplay style. Apparently, MariFlow is capable of reading controller inputs fifteen times a second, so it can figure out what and when it is supposed to do something when playing Super Mario Kart. After analyzing SethBling’s play style and practicing on its own, MariFlow was eventually able to win first place in both the Mushroom and Flower Cups at 50cc difficulty. That may not seem terribly impressive, but this is just the beginning. SethBling has reportedly publicly released the MariFlow code for others to use so that it can learn from their play styles and become even better at playing the game. It’s only a matter of time before MariFlow learns all the play styles necessary to become the world’s greatest Super Mario Kart player. The Singularity starts with video games…