I write "generic" Natural language processing for a living.
Also "nintendo" is a particular domain. When you only have a "language" of 8 directions, A, and B, and only time to deal with in response to a screen that side scrolls in only one direction the programming is easy.
A chess engine has more potential decisions for a bishop than this has for a given move. And unlike the the NES, the chess engine has to adjust for changes in the behavior. Given the same input the NES would make the same choices. You can macro through most the games.
1. This was a paper submitted for a joke conference. It is in no way a giant leap in AI. It is something that some nerds find amusing. Like an anti-Rube Goldberg machine. It is trying to accomplish something quite complex using a ridiculously stupid approach.
2. Its stupid because it is looking at the memory state as just a list of numbers that change during the gameplay. It has no knowledge of the actual game. It doesn't parse the memory to figure out game state or anything. It doesn't even have any generic idea of what games involve. It figures out "oo, the number that starts at location 243 goes up in the training data. I'll mash buttons to try to make memory location 243 go up".
You're taking this way too seriously. Think of it as someone tinkering with a specific algorithm who happens to overlay it ontop of NES games to show that it's working.
It's a cool project. If this is nothing compared to the things you've done, you're welcome to post them- we'd love to see them!
Also "nintendo" is a particular domain. When you only have a "language" of 8 directions, A, and B, and only time to deal with in response to a screen that side scrolls in only one direction the programming is easy.
A chess engine has more potential decisions for a bishop than this has for a given move. And unlike the the NES, the chess engine has to adjust for changes in the behavior. Given the same input the NES would make the same choices. You can macro through most the games.