But then I considered this as an analogue of genetics, and darwinism, and- well, what the heck! Measures of “good” or “best” change with time! People are no longer expected to know certain bits of information, or they are expected to know how to understand different concepts.

Heck, you could change the metrics for each level of Mario Brothers and get a hybrid solution for each level.

Of course, no one ever said you couldn’t change the fitness function whenever you feel like it….

but I’m not going to fiddle with it. I don’t run Linux, and I’d rather see what you do with it. :)

More screenshots!

P.S. I wonder if this game could possibly play Bubble Bobble?

The VM has a few opcodes for reading bytes and 2-byte words from game memory using the emulator’s FCEUI_MemSafePeek function, which takes a 16-bit address and returns the byte stored there. I’m pretty sure this gives you access to CHR, SCR, and everything else in the game’s address space. It’s the same technique that lets the fitness function look at the current score and virus count in the example in the main post.

However, I’m doubtful any of the solutions I’ve generated so far make any productive use of those opcodes. From the videos, it very much looks like they each hit on a “dumb” strategy of repeating the same move over and over and over, which just happens to do something useful. One feature I’d like to add in the future is a way to examine just what’s going on inside the hood, without manually poking around inside the solution files and doing the disassembly by hand.

I’m actually a bit surprised that your VM-based approach works that well. It’s possibly even better than an S-expression-based one. Interesting.

I’m excited you’re coming in this week!