HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

OP, Togelius, is quite wrong in 1 point at least.

tl;dr Seth Bling directly references NEAT and his links[Show More [1]] link to 2 Togelius papers[13][14] among many others !

To wit, in OP, Togelius mentions Seth Bling's MarI/O[1] as lacking scholarship because he didn't mention Togelius:

" seen as research, it is atrocious because of the complete lack of scholarship. The guy didn't even know he was reinventing the wheel, and didn't care to look it up. "

Rather disdaignfully (sadly/ ironically/ poigniantly) Togelius refers to Seth not by name but only as " some guy ".

Yet Seth Bling[2] in his short video, mentions and explains NEAT and directly links Ken Stanley's and Risto Miikkulainen's foundational NEAT paper[10] at U.texas which Togelius builds on [hint: click SHOW MORE under Seth's video]

And much more, i.e.: ---- the innovative toolchain Seth uses: Bizhawk to script SNES emulators in Lua [12]!

---- Seth links the wikipedia page on Neuroevolution[11] which directly references 2 of Togelius's own papers[13][14]

Seth's [Show More] Links on the MarI/O video[1] are very very comprehensive and (IMHO) indeed a great example of scholarship !

Togelius is a top flight scholar, and publishes in the field of AI game players and level generators[15] so I hope he will welcome some random tinkerer pointing out his error.

[full disclosure: I am a Togelius fan]

To give Togelius his due he does at least link to Seth's MarI/O video.

Perhaps Togelius failed to click / read the Show More links ? The charitable benefit of doubt principle is accidental oversight.

Seth Bling is primarily a Twitch Streamer[2] and Speed Runner[3] who often popularises complex programming[4], math and academic ideas[5] to a primarily young audience using Mario and Minecraft[6] and takes requests via his subreddit[7]

Seth's very popular Youtube video MarI/O which uses NEAT (Neuro Evolution of Augmenting Topologies] to learn and play Super Mario World, has led to a huge number of streamers on twitch playing other MarI/O levels[16], using RNNs, LSTMs, and other SMW levels and SNES games, like RNN multiplayer x4 Mario Karts[17].

The OP article is great, academic rigor and bibliographic scholarship might sometimes differentiate the full time university scholar from the amateur researcher, enthusiast or tinkerer.

Seth and his many followers may not be 'scholars' as in academic research but it is an amateur community of mostly youngsters doing their own research by having fun and sharing ideas, mostly undocumented outside their own transient twitch streams.

Compare this to the well respected amateur astronomy community and perhaps a responsible academic approach is to try to reach out and tap in rather than adding to the distance.

By his own OP standards of Togelius is lacking in that hasn't discovered/ mentioned the work done by the Twitch/ Bizhawk community - it is not entirely undocumented [16].

Togelius your AI Mario competition[8] is legendary in academic AI circles but not necessarily widely known by youngsters playing Mario ( and to be fair AFAIK you don't publish in their forums like twitch) although the code Infinite Mario[9] you base your work on is by Marcus Persson[10].

Though Persson is better known as Notch [10] ( author of Minecraft ) who is more famous than perhaps even Alan Turing , Yann le Cun, Jurgen Schmidhuber, or Geoff Hinton to the under 16 crowd.

Perhaps Togelius could mashup some of his work and do a crossover episode with Seth or relaunch the Infinite Mario competition[8] / benchmarks to this new younger crowd evolving Neural Topologies to play Mario games - or even help document some of their fun.

As public servants funded by tax dollars it is perhaps the responsibility of the academic to reach out rather than blaming fun loving amateurs popularising and doing research / 'tinkering' for not putting in the due diligence of scrupulously mentioning every source.

[IMHO] I agree amateurs don't always do full and proper scholarship and links are food for hungry minds - but they aren't publicly funded researchers but amateurs working for love of the subject in their spare time, for free, or for streaming donations and youtube hits, using transitory, live media and whose audience must be constantly engaged and may have shorter attention spans than the average academic.

[full disclosure I am an amatuer neural net nerd]

[1]Seth Bling's MarI/O https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44

[2]https://www.twitch.tv/sethbling

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-spFoon7klA sub 1 min SMW via credits warp

[4]Bling's arranging shells in SMW to human inject Flappy Bird code into SNES https://www.twitch.tv/videos/57032858

[4]Bling's Atari 2600 emulator built in Minecraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nViIUfDMJg

[5]Seth Bling's RNN Mario Cart race https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipi40cb_RsI

[6]Bling's Minecraft Redstone tutorials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzSpuMDtyUU&list=PL2Qvl4gaBg...

[7]https://sethbling.reddit.com

[8]Togelius 2009 Infinite Mario AI competition http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/

[9]https://web.archive.org/web/20080423023424/http://www.mojang...

[10]Stanley Miikkulainen NEAT paper http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?stanley:ec02

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution

[12] Scripting Lua in Bizhawk Emulator http://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/LuaFunctions.html

[13] Risi, Sebastian; Togelius, Julian (2017). "Neuroevolution in Games: State of the Art and Open Challenges" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.7326v3.pdf

[14] Togelius, Julian; Schaul, Tom; Schmidhuber, Jurgen; Gomez, Faustino (2008), "Countering poisonous inputs with memetic neuroevolution" (PDF), Parallel Problem Solving from Nature https://www.academia.edu/download/30945872/poison.pdf

[15] Togelius' Game AI book http://gameaibook.org/

[16] https://clips.twitch.tv/CourteousEmpathicTruffleCeilingCat

[16] https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/01/03/th...

[17] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9Y_I9vY8Qw

⬐ 1wu

Thanks for the commentary togelius [1, 2] and deepnet [above].

Anyone interested in adding a soupçon of scholarship to Seth's project?

Words do mean different things to different people, in different contexts..

There is a recent body of literature that explores the modern "maker" [3] movement. However, "maker" as a term may not have been a good fit for the OP's argument [1], which contrasted (academic) researchers with so-called "tinkerers".

An alternative term for "tinkerer" might be "bricoleur", a loanword from French. (Roughly, it still means one who tinkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage but has other meanings depending on the academic lens.)

Given that we are discussing AIs that play, in the context of education, we can also go back to Seymour Papert's work on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... .

Originally known for work on _Perceptrons_ with Marvin Minsky, AI researcher Papert later adapted theories from education towards the vision of "learning-by-making" and the (young) bricoleur [4]. This can approach can be seen in the evolution from 1960s graphical [turtle] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%2... to Lego https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) to modern day efforts to encourage coding-for-kids [5,6,7].

One of Papert's later collaborators, Sherry Turkel, discusses bricolage as it applies to programming -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#Internet .

When it comes to early education, Turkel argues for epistemological pluralism [8] and cites anthropologist Levi-Strauss in comparing analytic science with a "science of the concrete".

We can appreciate both Seth Bling's concreteness [9] and Togelius's original papers for academics. Almost a decade ago, Togelius introduced Super Mario Brothers as a benchmark for reinforcement learning [10] and, with Karakovskiy, for AI more generally [11].

deepnet what's your interest in neural nets?

[1] http://togelius.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-differences-between...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744694

[3] For example, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=maker+movement

[4] http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html

[5] https://scratch.mit.edu/

[6] https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

[7] https://github.com/google/blockly-games/wiki

[8] http://www.papert.org/articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44

[10] http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2009Super.pdf

[11] http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/

⬐ zimpenfish

To clarify, the description says "Using a new route I created, I executed the first ever sub-1min Super Mario World credits warp speedrun" - where "credits warp" is the critical piece missing from the HN title.

⬐ lmilcin

There does not exist a world where this is still playing the game for me. This sport should be called "hack run" and be considered different from traditional playing the game.

When I play the game with friends and family the skill is in using to the best of our ability the naturally perceived rules of the game.

Using your controller to input bits of data directly into the memory using a bug in the software is completely different sport.

⬐ eugeniub

Yeah, it's very interesting to learn that you can inject arbitrary code into the game through the controller, but the title gave me a very different expectation for the video.

⬐ ubernostrum

As others point out, game speedruns track a lot of categories.

For Super Mario World, for example, records are tracked for with/without glitches, pure-human play versus tool-assisted, how much of the game is played through (since even without glitches there are ways to complete the game without playing all levels), etc.

The current record for playing all 96 levels of the game is, according to speedrun.com, 1:22:21.310. Here's the video of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW7BMsifUBc

⬐ zkomp

This is still playing the game / i.e executing the instructions. Exactly the same instructions on same hardware that were distributed to everyone...

This is just the extreme form of the fastest way to complete the game, using the (broken) logic of the game itself.

Exactly the same situation as comparing play at home with kids to any elite world record setting play in the same game... "This world cup is not at all how I play at home ..."

⬐ fanzhang

To be fair I think there is a subculture where a hack run with hands under 1 minute is considered an accomplishment.

⬐ wmeredith

Agreed. This is certainly something, maybe even something interesting. But it's not beating the "game". Hell, it's not even playing the game.

⬐ flgr

There are different categories for speedruns. This is any%.

There's usually a "no major glitches" category, which shows more of the main game. In SMW this is called either 96 exits or 11 exits. Those are actually the default categories that are most heavily run from what it looks like.

See http://speedrun.com/smw

⬐ flgr

Or phrased differently: There are different kinds of art. You might not like each and every single type of art, but they're still part of art.

⬐ ahdroit

is art defined by intent or interpretation?

⬐ MR_FEET

both, sometimes simultaneously

⬐ tinus_hn

You can never really know another persons intent, you can only guess at it.