Mario Has Become Self-Aware

​”What happens if you jump on Goomba,” asks a pleasant female voice.

“If I jump on a Goomba, it certainly dies,” responds Mario in his new robo-voice. As the video explains, however, this demonstration is about content, not form.

It’s actually about quite a bit more than even language. Mario, as constructed by computer scientists at the University of Tübingen in Germany, becomes an autonomous agent within the Mario universe, cognizant of its rules and properties to the extent that it’s able to learn and react.

This is to say that Mario plays the game himself: Mario controls Mario.

More specifically, Mario controls Mario according to impulses and drives that ebb and flow as he/it learns the universe, becoming more and less curious and more or less hungry. Curiosity is manifested as an increasing drive to explore, while hunger manifests as as an increasing drive to collect coins. Simple motivations in a simple world.