We’ve all seen what AI can do, from generating profile pictures out of the blue to writing college-grade essays and even composing music. It’s all pretty impressive, and kind of scary.
Well, the promise of AI just got a bit more nostalgic. A team of researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen have just published a paper and GitHub page hinting at a future we could have only dreamed about as kids: endless Mario levels.
Meet MarioGPT.
DIY Mario: The team used GPT-2 (not one of the shiny new models we’ve all come to love and fear) to build a fine-tuned model for Super Mario levels generated from simple prompts.
Take, for example, the GIF above. It’s a snapshot of one of the infinite possible levels, and it was generated from the prompt “many pipes, little enemies, some blocks, high elevation.”
To do this, the researchers had to render each tile within a level as a specific text character. Once that was done, they could feed the new text-based levels into the model. From there, they built in some functions that would take the prompts and choose the most interesting way to present them. Boom, a new Mario level is born.
But why GPT-2? It seems to boil down to the sheer complexity coupled with the team’s curiosity. The daunting task of generating entire levels of one of the most beloved games of all time with a simple text prompt led the authors to pick GPT-2 due to its smaller scale and because it’s lightweight and easier to train. This also made it quicker to test their idea.
Are these levels playable? Mostly, yes! According to the paper, around 88% of the levels were immediately playable by their game-playing software, and there’s more to come. Shyam Sudhakaran, the lead author, told TechCrunch: “In future work, we’re gonna explore richer datasets.”
It seems society has double-jumped our way into a future of endless Mario possibilities.
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