This AI “solves” Super Mario Bros. and other classic NES games

Nintendo

In the 28 years since Super Mario Bros. was released, and it's obviously been comprehensively beaten, thoroughly, many thousands of times in that time by players around the world. But have you ever made the game beat itself?

That's what computer scientist Tom Murphy has done. At SigBovik 2013, he presented a program that "solves" how to play Super Mario Bros., or any other NES game, like it's just another kind of mathematical problem. And for those who know that SigBovik is an annual computer science conference dedicated to spoof research, hosted on April 1 every year, Murphy stresses that this is "100 percent real."

He outlines his method in a paper, "The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel... after that it gets a little tricky," but he also presented the results in the video you can see with this story.