Artificial intelligence has found new ways to play Q * bert

Has apparently discovered loopholes in the game code that allow for a high-end scoring.

Games have long been an important part of research on artificial intelligence, and especially classic games with reasonably simple rules have been popular. Scientists have been able to release their smart computer programs on such games to see how quickly they learn them and how good they can be. Quite often it turns out, not surprisingly, that they are far better than human players.

But perhaps the most important lesson we should take with us, in the way that research is over and we end up in Terminator, is that computers are not sure to be clean. It has a version of the Canonical ES KI system shown by finding completely new ways to cheat in the Atari 2600 version of Q * bert on.

Cheating and affection!
Q * Bert is a classic arcade game where you play a little guy who has to jump around on a kind of pseudo-three-dimensional board. Each time he jumps to a new field on the board, it gets a new color and the goal is to color all the fields. At the same time, monsters do their best to ruin for you, inter alia, by destroying your coloring.

Canonical ES has, after much trial and error, found a way to earn almost infinite points. It starts by coloring all fields as normal, which causes the fields to start flashing as a visual reward for completing the level (yes, we were a little easier to satisfy early in the eighties). But during the flash, it begins to bounce around and score points in an apparently impossible way, which in turn causes the flash to continue and continue.

Exactly what's happening is unclear but the blinking effect is that all fields change color very quickly and many have therefore come to the theory that the computer system manages to hunt their hips so that it lands on a field just in the millisecond it has "Right" color to score points. The chance that a human being would do something similar is almost impossible.

Note that this is not the original version of Q * bert, which appeared in the arcades, but an official version for the Atari 2600. The game's original creator, Warren Davis, says on Twitter that he doubts the same would have been possible in the arcade version.

More affection
Canonical ES has also found another way to get points by repeatedly taking suicide. It turns out that it is possible (through a bug, maybe?) To jump on enemies in a way that gives the "player" enough points to get a new life immediately. This does it over and over and seems to be successful. Take a look:

It looks crazy to play such a thing, of course, nothing of the data intelligence cares about. It will only win.

These experiments are of course part of a major research project, and you can read the entire dissertation for free online. http://linkshrink.net/7gSOwk