Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Prototype: github.com/cirosantilli/Urho3D-cheat

Prior art research: github.com/cirosantilli/awesome-reinforcement-learning-games

Less good discrete prototype: github.com/cirosantilli/rl-game-2d-grid YouTube demo: Video 1. "Top Down 2D Continuous Game with Urho3D C++ SDL and Box2D for Reinforcement learning by Ciro Santilli (2018)".

The goal of this project is to reach artificial general intelligence.

A few initiatives have created reasonable sets of robotics-like games for the purposes of AI development, most notably: OpenAI and DeepMind.

However, all projects so far have only created sets of unrelated games, or worse: focused on closed games designed for humans!

What is really needed is to create a single cohesive game world, designed specifically for this purpose, and with a very large number of game mechanics.

Notably, by "game mechanic" is meant "a magic aspect of the game world, which cannot be explained by object's location and inertia alone" in order to test the the missing link between continuous and discrete AI.

Much in the spirit of gvgai, we have to do the following loop:

The question then becomes: do we have enough computational power to simulation a game worlds that is analogous enough to the real world, so that our AI algorithms will also apply to the real world?

To reduce computation requirements, it is better to focus on a 2D world at first. Such world with the right mechanics can break any AI, while still being faster to simulate than a 3D world.

The initial prototype uses the Urho3D open source game engine, and that is a reasonable project, but a raw Simple DirectMedia Layer + Box2D + OpenGL solution from scratch would be faster to develop for this use case, since Urho3D has a lot of human-gaming features that are not needed, and because 2019 Urho3D lead developers disagree with the China censored keyword attack.

Simulations such as these can be viewed as a form of synthetic data generation procedure, where the goal is to use computer worlds to reduce the costs of experiments and to improve reproducibility.

Ciro has always had a feeling that AI research in the 2020's is too unambitious. How many teams are actually aiming for AGI? When he then read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) it said the same. AGI research has become a taboo in the early 21st century.

Related projects:

Related ideas:

Bibliograpy:

To some extent, the ultimate achievement of a TAS is to achieve arbitrary code execution (ACE) on a game, although this has been becoming rarer and rarer in newer consoles. The Nintendo 64 is the current interesting ACE discovery frontier as of 2020.

Post ACE, you then get into more subtle categories which tend to be more geometric clipping through wall glitches, but those can still be fun.

The most beautiful TAS content ever made are:

It is also amusing to see console verification of emulations, e.g.: Video 1. "Super Mario 64 '120 Stars' in 1:20:41.52 Console Verified by Soul Umbreon (2012)".