In a stunning turn of events, a top-ranking AI system was soundly defeated by a human player in the strategic board game Go. This marks a significant reversal of the 2016 victory by the computer, which was widely celebrated as a landmark achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The victorious player, Kellin Pelrine, holds a rank just below the top amateur level and was able to exploit a previously unidentified vulnerability in the AI system that had been detected by another computer. The games were played without any direct computer assistance, and Pelrine emerged as the clear winner by winning 14 out of 15 games.

Financial Times mentioned that this victory, which has not been previously disclosed, brought to light a flaw in the top Go computer programs that is common to many of today’s prevalent AI systems, including San Francisco-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. The strategy used to win the Go match was proposed by a computer program that investigated the AI systems to discover any weaknesses. Pelrine, who executed the proposed plan with merciless precision, was able to use the tactics to put the human player back on top of the Go board.

After beating humans in video games, AI is now taking on game design.

A team of computer programmers at IT University of Copenhagen has developed a new way to encode and generate Super Mario Bros. levels—called MarioGPT, the new approach is based on the language model GPT-2. The group outlines their work and the means by which others can use their system in a paper on the arXiv pre-print server.

Mario Brothers is a video game first introduced in 1983—it involves two Italian plumbers emerging from a sewer and attempting to rescue Princess Peach, who has been captured and held by Bowser. To rescue her, the brothers must travel (via input from the game player) across a series of obstacles made of pipes and bricks. As they travel, the terrain changes in accordance with the level they have achieved in the game. In this new effort, the team in Denmark has recreated one aspect of the game—the number of levels that can be traversed.

The researchers used Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2)—an open-source language model created by a team at OpenAI, to translate user requests into graphical representations of Super Mario Brothers game levels. To do so, they created a small bit of Python code to help the language model understand what needed to be done and then trained it using samples from the original Super Mario Bros. game and one of its sequels, “Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.”