Gaming’s Whacked Out Week: When Creepy AI Gets its Game On by Itself

Damn it, humanity. Did you learn nothing from Terminator?

A little AI is a dangerous thing. It all starts innocently enough, with a fancy-ass new sentient weed whacker or something. Then, before we know what the hell's going on, there's angry robo-dudes travelling through time to kill our moms in the eighties, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and that other guy appearing out of nowhere and striding about with their wangs out.

It's just an all-round bad time for everyone.

So what in the name of holy hell are we supposed to make of this? Computers don't yet have command over the entire U.S defense network, but this little doohickey is the next best thing. It can... play shitty old Game Boy games by itself. Kinda sorta.

Yup. Daniel Shumway, developer and Miles Dyson in the making, has been working on a system he's called Piglet. It interacts with a Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulator, and can slowly and painstakingly make its way through a game by changing its strategy and correcting its mistakes. But it's much less terrifying and SkyNet-y than it sounds, as you'll see after the jump.

Over on Nintendolife, Shumway gave a jargontastic description of the process. Then decided to actually make some freaking sense. Essentially,
‘Imagine you're blindfolded, and handed a controller, and told to play a game. Every time you press a button something happens in the game, but you can't see that happening. Your only interface with the game is that you have a friend sitting next to you - and whenever something on the screen changes, he shouts in your ear, "Hey, something changed!" It works surprisingly well.'

So, this dealie can't actually ‘see' the screen. There's some complicated code-y stuff going on in the background, which we sure as hell don't want to go into on a Friday morning. Nevertheless, this is a thing right here. Impressive stuff. It's just a shame that it looks hilariously lame in action:

Hit the link for more on the project.