Remember Mortal Kombat? To be specific, the first Mortal Kombat. That machine that devoured tokens and coins without pity, that was censored on certain consoles, and whose music is probably playing in your head right now. According to a group of students at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, a new artificial intelligence platform called Retro Learning Environment is capable of learning to play Super Nintendo titles, and apparently it has acquired some skill at Mortal Kombat...
I was lucky enough to play Mortal Kombat on a real arcade machine, and I experienced firsthand how brutal the artificial intelligence could be. Obviously, the owner had configured the game to be at Very Hard, forcing young enthusiasts to come back for more. Twenty years later I can say that I recognize the vast majority of the patterns the AI applies on Very Hard, and finishing the game undefeated or with just one Continue has become quite frequent. I think I would get better control of Sub-Zero (eternal favorite, excuse the bias) with a gamepad or another keyboard (my old Model M is more prepared for data entry than games), but there comes a point when Mortal Kombat has nothing to teach... to a human. Now, if we replace it with an artificial intelligence in training, things become very interesting.
Quick trip to the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where a group of students designed Retro Learning Environment, a platform that seeks to master the most important titles of the Super Nintendo console, including the aforementioned Mortal Kombat. The study, which is not accompanied by high-resolution images and has not yet been evaluated by third parties, explains the difficulties RLE faces due to the environmental complexity in Super Nintendo games. Mortal Kombat became an ideal case for the AI, since its backgrounds are relatively static, and both players share the same screen. The text talks about different trained agents, but it was in Mortal Kombat that one of them managed to defeat a human opponent.
Needless to say, the RLE platform has a lot of work ahead. One thing is processing Atari 2600 games with relatively simple graphics (and not any less difficult for that), but the challenge becomes much greater when we add blocks, combos, special moves, fatalities, and the general properties of each available character. Personally, I would love to have a duel with that AI, although I imagine copyright issues and other technical details will prevent the existence of an online version that lets us exchange a few blows. Too bad.
