There can never be too much Mario in the world. Sure, it’s probably been a while since you played one of the original NES games, but probably because they’re so familiar. What if I told you researchers had created a way to generate infinite Mario levels so you can play a brand new one every day until the sun burns out?
A team at IT University of Copenhagen just released a (pre-pub) paper and Github page showing a new method for encoding and generating Super Mario Bros levels, which they call MarioGPT. (Somewhere in Redmond, a lawyer sips his coffee and begins typing.)
MarioGPT is based on GPT-2, not one of these newfangled conversational AIs. These large language models are good at not just taking in words in sentences like these and putting out more like them — they are general purpose pattern recognition and replication machines.
“We honestly just picked the ...
