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Computer program that learns to play classic NES games

suckerpinch · demo · Watch on YouTube

Machine learning & deep learningGame history & retro gamingChess, board games & puzzles

What it is

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Loved on HN as a hilarious, brilliant example of hacker-academic work and cited whenever game-playing AI or fuzzing comes up.

  • 9 people recommended it
  • 10 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “His video on learnfun/playfun is both hilarious and amazing.”

    Hilarious and amazing learnfun/playfun video.

    learc83, 2018-02 · Strong recommendation · in “A C89 compiler that produces executables that are also valid ASCII text files [pdf]”

  2. “Watch the whole thing, it's delightful.”

    AI that paused Tetris before losing, predating DeepMind Atari.

    fartcannon, 2021-02 · Strong recommendation · in “Medical chatbot using OpenAI’s GPT-3 told a fake patient to kill themselves”

  3. “Pretty entertaining stuff.”

    Entertaining automated NES playing from RAM byte patterns.

    recondite, 2015-03 · Recommendation · in “SIGBOVIK 2015 Proceedings [pdf]”

  4. “Tom 7's work on machine learning and NES emulation is very impressive.”

    Tom7's LearnFun/PlayFun game-playing AI.

    fixermark, 2016-04 · Recommendation · in “Automatic 3Dification of Nintendo Games: The GlEnd() of Zelda”

  5. “tom7's video [1] and paper [2] on Playfun are both fascinating.”

    Dumber approach to machines learning to play games.

    tomjakubowski, 2016-05 · Recommendation · in “Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide”

  6. “I definitely recommend this series of three youtube videos”

    Series on AI playing games, better than humans.

    d33, 2016-06 · Recommendation · in “Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels”

  7. “They fit in the same area of craziness, and are absolutely great.”

    One of the author's crazy and great projects.

    onli, 2017-04 · Recommendation · in “The glEnd of Zelda(): Automatic 3Dification of NES Games (2016)”

  8. “tom7 is awesome.”

    Hilarious video on SIGBOVIK NES-playing AI research.

    dan_quixote, 2022-10 · Recommendation · in “MAR1D: First-Person Mario”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: learnfun, playfun, tom7, nes, sigbovik, machine learning

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