Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to pursue a number of things. There are many questions as to what exactly AI is capable of, but you can cross off one thing from the list: learning how to play Super Mario World.
The guys over at Kotaku decided to use Sethbling's AI to determine how the technology would fare trying to learn the video game. All video games have learning curves and hooking up the AI to gameplay capture software showed it trying over and over again to get Mario to his goal.
According to Kotaku, the AI's efforts to accomplish its aim were indicative of neural evolution, which is essentially to learn something by associating outcomes with actions. The AI was able to come up with different possible solutions to the problems it encountered by mimicking the way neurons communicate with each other in the brain.
Neural evolution works when the AI discovers a solution and builds upon that to find an even better solution. That's how "evolution" occurs, which is represented by "generation," "species" and "genome" in the video.
The possibilities are truly endless with AI, but not everyone's sold on the idea of letting the technology, although they were developed to support humans, "learn" too much. After all, what's going to happen when AI goes rogue, right?
Well, there was actually a study carried out to determine the worst-case scenarios that "evil" AI can cook up. Receiving funding support from Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, the study was conducted by Roman Yampolskiy and Federico Pistono. It was done exactly for the same reason that DARPA asks researchers to try and turn ordinary items at home into weapons.
According to the Yampolskiy and Pistono, identifying threats now rather than adapting later will make it possible for humans to defend against AI-related disasters. They also said that writing code without oversight is one way to create harmful AI.
In March, Microsoft apologized for racist and sexist tweets made by its AI chatbot Tay. The company said the AI was not designed like so and was compromised by an attack that took advantage of the chatbot's vulnerabilities.
Watch Sethbling's AI learn how to play Super Mario World below!
