But the AI isn't making strategic decisions. It's making brain-dead ones. It analyses a play-through looking to find sections of RAM that increase as time increases. It them locks in on these sections of RAM and says "increasing the values in these sections of RAM is how I determine success." It them brute-forces a play-through with the ability to rewind time (to try a different set of inputs).
This is why he mentions that Karate Kid didn't work well, because one of the factors of a successful play-through was that your opponents health is decreasing, which is something that this AI doesn't look for.
The ability to rewind time wouldn't make for a very interesting play-through of Battleship, but depending on how game state is stored, it might not even be able to accurately deduce a good game state from a bad one.
This is why he mentions that Karate Kid didn't work well, because one of the factors of a successful play-through was that your opponents health is decreasing, which is something that this AI doesn't look for.
I don't believe that was the case. From the video he mentioned it using the power kicks up all on the first enemy because they produced the most favorable outcome for that game, at the expense of later games when more powerful moves are needed (since the AI can't plan that far ahead).
From the paper, written by the same person who made the video:
"The result is not impressive at all; the main goal here is to reduce the opponent's health, but our objective function can
only track bytes that go up."
I can't watch the video at the moment but I imagine the paper goes much farther in-depth with the internals of this AI.
This is why he mentions that Karate Kid didn't work well, because one of the factors of a successful play-through was that your opponents health is decreasing, which is something that this AI doesn't look for.
The ability to rewind time wouldn't make for a very interesting play-through of Battleship, but depending on how game state is stored, it might not even be able to accurately deduce a good game state from a bad one.