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Super Mario AI learns how to kill goombas, heralds Skynet
Who knew the end of the world would be prophesied by a weird mixture of Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World sprites? Researchers at Germany's University of Tuebingen are the naive harbingers of doom, and the Super Mario artificial intelligence they developed is their omen. As shown in the video below the break, the researchers' Mario AI can understand a wide array of voice commands, learn a similarly substantial amount of data from instructions, and autonomously adapt to his environment. Tell him you can kill goombas by jumping on them, and he'll respond, "If I jump on goomba, then it certainly dies," albeit in a robotic voice. Or you can tell him to kill a goomba, and he'll start learning how to on his own (Danger! Danger!).
Swarm robots attack your bookshelf, win AAAI Oscar
What's more frightening than a swarm of robots? An award-winning swarm of robots trained to raid your library -- that's what. This SciFi-worthy outfit of mechanized literature swindlers, known as the "Swarmanoid," landed themselves the Best Video Award at this week's AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) conference in San Francisco. The video in question features the mixed bag of eye-bots, hand-bots and foot-bots in an Oceans 11-style bookcase heist. Of course, there are probably easier ways to reach the top shelf (e.g. a ladder), but none that get us thinking about the end times quite like this. The full video awaits you after the break.
