當超級馬里奧遇上人工智能

Anybody can make Mario, Nintendo’s world-famous little plumber, race through the Mushroom Kingdom, chasing coins. But what if Mario could do it on his own?

《超級馬里奧》是任天堂遊戲公司出品的世界級名作，任何人都可以控制水管工馬里奧在蘑菇王國中跑着追逐硬幣。不過，試想一下如果馬里奧能自行完成這些任務會怎樣？

That’s the goal of the Mario A.I. Project: to develop an artificially intelligent Mario agent that becomes aware of himself and his environment, making decisions about what to do based on spoken instructions.

這就是馬里奧人工智能項目的目標：造出一個模擬智能的馬里奧，他將擁有自我意識，能夠感知周圍的環境，並能根據語音指令決定如何行動。

Built by members of the Cognitive Modeling Group at Germany’s University of Tubingen, the Mario A.I. Project has released a video demonstrating and explaining the initiative. And while the team’s progress seems to be slow, it’s pretty cool to think of this most-famous of game characters having a will of his own.

這一項目由德國蒂賓根大學（University of Tubingen）的認知模型組成員研發，目前已發佈了一段演示和解釋視頻。儘管項目進展看似緩慢，但想到馬里奧這個超人氣遊戲角色將擁有自己的思維，還是非常酷的一件事。

Using Carnegie-Mellon’s Sphinx speech-recognition toolkit, the video’s narrator explains, Mario can understand a large number of English sentences and commands. Based on a huge logic and grammar tree the team built, he can answer things about what he knows based on what he’s been told and can take actions based on what he’s learned.

視頻敘述者解釋說，使用卡耐基梅隆大學（Carnegie-Mellon）的斯芬克斯語音識別工具包，馬里奧能理解大量的英文句子和指令。基於研發團隊構建的龐大的邏輯和語法樹，馬里奧能回答有關他被告知過的事情的問題，還能根據學到的知識採取行動。

He can even make decisions based on his emotions or his needs. For example, if Mario’s hungry, he’ll chase coins. If he’s just feeling curious, he’ll explore the Mushroom Kingdom, autonomously gathering knowledge about items he doesn’t know much about yet.

馬里奧甚至能根據自己的情感和需要做出決定。例如，如果馬里奧餓了，他就會追逐金幣。如果他只是好奇，將會探索蘑菇王國，主動地積累知識，獲取新知。

Vocabulary

plumber: 水管工

A.I. (artificial intelligence): 人工智能

cognitive: 認知的

toolkit: 工具包

curious: 好奇的